Tocqueville on Democracy

Tocqueville on Democracy

Author: Talking Politics April 30, 2020 Duration: 44:52
Talking Politics: HISTORY OF IDEAS
NewsNews & PoliticsPolitics

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835/40) can claim to be the best book ever written about democracy and the best book ever written about America. David discusses what Tocqueville was expecting when he went to see American democracy for himself and what he actually found. Tocqueville was amazed and impressed by the American way of doing politics, but his fears about how its democracy might go wrong remain as prescient as ever.


Free online version of the text:

Recommended version to purchase: 

Going Deeper:

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.


A new series of talks by David Runciman, in which he explores some of the most important thinkers and prominent ideas lying behind modern politics – from Hobbes to Gandhi, from democracy to patriarchy, from revolution to lock down. Plus, he talks about the crises – revolutions, wars, depressions, pandemics – that generated these new ways of political thinking. From the team that brought you Talking Politics: a history of ideas to help make sense of what’s happening today. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 27

Official website RSS
instagramlinkedin
Talking Politics: HISTORY OF IDEAS
Podcast Episodes
History of Ideas Q and A [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 39:48
A special episode in which David answers some of the audience's questions about the second series of History of Ideas. From how he chooses which writers and works to talk about, to whether Boris Johnson is the ultimate B…
Shklar on Hypocrisy [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 46:11
Judith Shklar’s Ordinary Vices (1984) made the case that the worst of all the vices is cruelty. But that meant we needed to be more tolerant of some other common human failings, including snobbery, betrayal and hypocrisy…
Nozick on Utopia [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 45:58
Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) was designed as a rebuttal to Rawls but it was so much more than that. It offered a defence of the minimal state that appealed to the writers of The Sopranos and a vision…
Rawls on Justice [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 48:00
John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) changed the face of modern political philosophy by reinventing the question of what constitutes fairness. From ‘the veil of ignorance’ to ‘reflective equilibrium’ it introduced new…
De Beauvoir on the Other [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 47:54
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) is one of the founding texts of modern feminism and one of the most important books of the twentieth century. It covers everything from ancient myth to modern psychoanalysis to…
Schumpeter on Democracy [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 47:47
Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942) contains a famous, and minimal, definition of democracy as the competition between political elites to sell themselves to the electorate. Schumpeter wanted t…
Schmitt on Friend vs Enemy [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 45:44
Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (1932) has been hugely influential on the left as well as the right of political debate despite the fact that its author joined the Nazi Party shortly after its publication. Da…
Luxemburg on Revolution [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 46:00
Rosa Luxemburg wrote ‘The Russian Revolution’ (1918) from a jail cell in Germany. In it she described how the Bolshevik revolution was going to change the world but also explained how and why it was already going badly w…
Nietzsche on Morality [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 46:57
Friedrich Nietzsche’s masterpiece The Genealogy of Morality (1887) sets out to explain where ideas of good and evil come from and why they have left human beings worse off. He traces their origins in what he calls the sl…
Butler on Machines [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 47:08
Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) is a strange and unsettling book about a world turned upside down. Usually classified as utopian or dystopian fiction, it also contains an eerie prophecy about the coming of intelligent mac…

123»