Can contemporary democratic regimes weather the political storms generated by illiberal nationalist and populist movements? In this elegantly written and insightful book, Ewa Atanassow urges us to see these threats to liberal democracy as the latest manifestations of democracy’s inherent “dilemmas” or what she describes as the “tensions” and “conundrums” (p. 10) that plague modern popular governments. The questions that motivate this study are not new. By approaching them as “timeless questions of modern politics” (p. 6)—or as the book’s pithy title indicates, enduring dilemmas that originated in the early nineteenth century and persist through the present—Atanassow hopes to secure liberal democracy’s future by returning to its past.
For this task, Tocqueville’s Dilemmas, and Ours foregrounds Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings on sovereignty and global affairs. As both a “complex” and “ambivalent” (p. 10) observer of American democracy and a French statesman, Tocqueville was attuned to what Atanassow calls the central dilemma of democratic life: the “tension between the universal scope of [its] principles and the particularity and limits of any political attempt to realize them in practice” (p. 3). Democracies are built on the principle of human equality. But because we live in a world of diverse cultures and societies, our political practices often run afoul of such universalist, egalitarian aspirations. According to Atanassow, virtually all the dangers that democracies face, from swelling nationalist sentiment to the resurgence of autocratic rule, showcase the broader conflict between the universal and the particular. When viewed in this light, Tocqueville’s questions are our questions. The Frenchman’s answers likewise transcend his time. Much more than an antiquated figure in the history of political thought, Atanassow’s dilemma-driven Tocqueville is a guide for committed liberal democrats in the twenty-first century. His insights anchor the “nondogmatic,” “ambivalent,” and “nonideological” liberalism (pp. 4, 6) that the author aims to reconstruct in the struggle to save constitutional governments.
By placing the theme of dilemmas front and center, the book’s three main chapters offer fresh readings of Tocqueville’s work—an impressive feat given the extensive literature on Democracy in America (1835/1840). Each chapter moves from political theory to a single “case study” (p. 19), revealing how Tocqueville tackled real-world controversies: the nullification crisis in Jacksonian America (chap. 1), France’s 1840 response to the Eastern question (chap. 2), and Algerian colonization (chap. 3). Even the most discerning interpreters of Democracy have overlooked Tocqueville’s remarks about popular sovereignty and peoplehood, topics that Atanassow explores in careful detail in chapter 1. For although Tocqueville marveled at how the providential sweep of equality “pushes against all limits and borders,” he recognized that popular government needs a circumscribed “people” (pp. 20, 62) along with a “story about the particular collective that is entitled to govern itself” (p. 103).
Atanassow claims that such imagined communities are prerequisites for the survival of liberal democracies. And surprisingly, they may be strengthened by the same globalizing processes that seem to erode them. One of the book’s most illuminating discussions appears in chapter 3, where Atanassow contrasts Tocqueville’s neglected thoughts on globalization with those of his contemporaries, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Unlike Marx and Engels, who imagined a zero-sum struggle between national identities and capitalist expansion, Tocqueville believed that the worldwide egalitarian revolution would solidify national differences while effacing class distinctions. Taking its cue from Tocqueville’s analysis, the book suggests that today’s liberal democracies should not—and need not—sacrifice their own identities.
Chapters 2 and 3 look outward from America and France to the rest of the world. Atanassow reopens Tocqueville’s 1840 exchange with J. S. Mill on the issue of war and national pride, aiming to correct scholars’ standard interpretations that often pit an unapologetic, pugnacious Tocqueville against an even-tempered Mill. It is true, as chapter 2 notes, that their correspondence over the Eastern crisis did not put an end to their fruitful friendship. Furthermore, both figures recognized the shortcomings of their respective positions, a point that resounds throughout Atanassow’s clear-headed interpretation. Yet the book’s effort to rehabilitate Tocqueville’s reputation in this period is much less convincing. Although he did acknowledge the potential pitfalls of populist fervor, Tocqueville continued to insist on the indispensable role of national pride in revivifying France’s languid, bourgeois-led domestic life.
As Atanassow points out, Tocqueville clashed with the July Monarchy’s foreign minister François Guizot about how and where to channel the nation’s energies (pp. 92–93): to pursue international glory or domestic material prosperity. For Tocqueville, “if the government is to be both liberal and democratic, involving the people in international affairs is no longer a matter of choice but of double necessity” (p. 99). The entire globe becomes “the arena where the highest form of national instruction can take place” (p. 101) and the crucible in which French identity is further forged. But Atanassow’s conclusions about Tocqueville’s internationalist turn cannot help but underscore its militarism. In the case of the Eastern crisis, Tocqueville declared that “a disadvantageous war was less to be feared than ‘a peace without glory’” (p. 91). Even if he could foresee some of the dangers stirred by patriotic sentiment, Tocqueville himself seemed to err on the side of grand nationalist excess when it came to reforming his enfeebled French democracy.
It seems an odd choice, then, to resurrect Tocqueville’s nineteenth-century calls to assert French dominance abroad to address the current crises of liberal democracy. Even so, Atanassow does not shy away from bold Tocquevillean conclusions in the book’s closing pages, though she presents them under the heading of “liberal moderation” (p. 174). “To remain liberal, then, democracy requires the…conciliation of national pride” (p. 167) fostered by an active foreign policy. But where do we draw the line between building a salutary national identity and justifying illiberal policies that endanger other nations and people, some within our own borders? Can a democracy cultivate national pride by taking a leading role on the world stage, as the book’s “nondogmatic” liberal perspective recommends, without succumbing to the sword rattling that suffused Tocqueville’s imperialism?
By marshaling Tocqueville on the contentious issues of colonization and globalization, Atanassow seems to reinforce the complexity of those dilemmas she so expertly highlights— while also leading us implicitly to question the value of Tocqueville’s solutions. Despite these lingering questions, scholars of Tocqueville, contemporary democratic theorists, and anyone worried about the fate of free government will find much to learn in this thoughtful and timely book.
