The Man Who Understood Democracy by Olivier Zunz

The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis De Tocqueville
By Olivier Zunz
Princeton University Press, 2022

There’s no gainsaying the credentials of Olivier Zunz, who’s the James Madison Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Virginia and the editor of the elegant Library of America edition of Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. And yet his new book, The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis De Tocqueville, gives pause with a handful of irritants right out of the starting gate. “The Man Who Understood Democracy” sets an off-puttingly narrow framing for a book billing itself as a full-dress biography, just as “The Man Who Wrote Moby-Dick” would serve more as a warning than an advertisement for a biography of Herman Melville (although it would at least be accurate; De Tocqueville was undoubtedly brilliant, but he wasn’t the only man who understood democracy). In his Note on Sources, Zunz cites his own work (this pernicious academic habit is persistently annoying; as schoolchildren are constantly told, you cannot cite yourself as a source). The book has no Bibliography (another widespread plague; if you want to know the works Zunz used, you’ll have to comb through his 60 pages of End Notes and assemble one on your own). And so on. 

It’s been nearly 20 years since Hugh Brogan’s sumptuous biography of De Tocqueville, and although Zunz is one of the foremost scholars of the subject alive today, The Man Who Understood Democracy largely tells the same story, as it could hardly help but do. That story – the 1831 journey through America that De Tocqueville undertook with his friend Gustav De Beaumont, his subsequent writing of the masterpiece Democracy in America, and his participation in the French politics of the Second Republic and the 1848 Revolution – is well-supported with ample documentation, from the minutiae of what De Tocqueville ate in Boston to the grander philosophical overviews of his impressions of politics and, as promised, the perils and potentials of democracy, which he’d witnessed first-hand in two very different national laboratories.

Likely nobody alive knows the details of Tocqueville’s political thinking better than Zunz does, which probably accounts for how ready the narrative is in these pages to veer from biography to ideological discussion and back. The dates and locations and people of Tocqueville’s life are all here, from weak lungs to fervent love to the man’s persistent ability to make friends and keep them, but the daily life feels distinctly subordinated to the political theorizing. Reading The Man Who Understood Democracy will leave you with a far better sense of what Tocqueville thought than who Tocqueville was. That may be entirely fitting, but readers who come to biography for more flesh and blood should know about it ahead of time either way.

And what about those ideas? According to Zunz, it’s fairly simple. “Tocqueville’s deepest belief was that democracy is a powerful, yet demanding, political form,” he writes. “What makes Toqueville’s work still relevant is that he defined democracy as an act of will on the part of every citizen – a project constantly in need of revitalization and the strength provided by stable institutions.”

“Democracy can never be taken for granted,” Zunz concludes, a sentiment that springs from Tocqueville’s own life but nonetheless seems squarely aimed at our own 21st century moment, when it so often seems that the only people who aren’t taking democracy for granted are the people zealously trying to bury it deep in an unmarked grave. Maybe the best result of Zunz’s book would be just that direct: getting more Americans to read Democracy in America before the title is describing a lost world.

-Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.