DIDN'T RICHARD REEVES ALREADY DO THIS?:

Touring an America Tocqueville Could Fathom (EDWARD ROTHSTEIN, 4/11/05, NY Times)

"This entire book was written in the grip of a kind of religious terror," Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his introduction to "Democracy in America." It is difficult to believe. Religious terror? Tocqueville, an aristocratic French lawyer, wrote his classic text after a nine-month visit to the United States in 1831. And far from being saturated with terror, it is a refined, detached series of reflections on the effects of American democracy on character, commerce, culture and belief: why the arts in America are more concerned with utility than beauty, why Americans tend to be restless, why democracy encourages a passionate spirituality.

But what occasioned the terror, Tocqueville informs us, was his conviction that American democracy grew out of an "irresistible revolution" that had been unfolding for centuries, leaving behind ruins of the old world while erecting a strange new one in which equality is the guiding principle. That revolution had touched and terrorized France; in varying degrees it was coursing through Europe. But it was in America that it had taken on its purest form. Tocqueville sensed the inevitability of its influence and the trauma of its coming transformations: in democracy much is lost even as much is gained.

Yet despite the passage of more than 170 years, and the triumph of democratic ideals throughout the West, sentiments of religious terror in the face of democratic revolution are still in the air, though often felt with far less sympathy than Tocqueville expressed. That "irresistible revolution" has now even become an explicit aspect of American policy, inspiring accusations - not least in France - of both utopianism and imperialism. And while some of the energy behind contemporary anti-Americanism is spurred by objections to particular policies, its passion is also driven by the same terror that Tocqueville felt as he watched early democratic institutions displace older orders.

Given that passion, it was a stroke of genius for The Atlantic Monthly to renew the Tocquevillian project by commissioning the distinguished French philosopher, journalist and gadfly Bernard-Henri Lévy to repeat Tocqueville's journey through America and chronicle his observations over the next several months in the magazine before they appear in book form early next year.

The first installment of his account, in the May issue of The Atlantic, highlights some of the threads that will be woven through the travelogue. It seems that Mr. Lévy, like Tocqueville, is often uneasy about America but always entranced by it. And at least so far, he can claim, like Tocqueville, that his account "is not precisely tailored to anyone's point of view."

While Tocqueville deduces American character from abstract principles, Mr. Lévy wants to discover the abstract principles through observation of the American character. So the elegant logic that Tocqueville uses to outline democracy's effects is replaced in Mr. Lévy's first installment by the accumulation of anecdote and carefully observed description.

Too bad they charge for content now and far fewer will read it.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 14, 2005 6:29 PM