Virtue's Aristocrat.(Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life)(Book review)

Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life, by Hugh Brogan (Yale, 736 pp., $35)

THIRTY years ago, in surveying the history of Tocqueville scholarship, the distinguished sociologist Robert Nisbet noted that in seven years as an undergraduate and graduate student in social sciences at Berkeley in the 1930s he "did not once hear the name Tocqueville in class or seminar." But the calamitous history of the world in that decade was already leading academe to revise its low estimate of the French thinker: By 1940 important studies of Tocqueville, essay-length and book-length, had been published by G. W. Pierson, J. P. Mayer, and Albert Salomon. From the 1950s through the 1970s, such ...