Opulence and Dependency in a Democratic Age

Acareful engagement with Christine Dunn Henderson’s welcome new edition of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Memoirs on Pauperism and Other Writings, just released by the University of Notre Dame Press, reveals the multiple ways in which the great French historian, social scientist, and political philosopher remains our contemporary. As in all his writings, Tocqueville addresses the promise and peril inherent in the democratic order emerging throughout what he called “the European/Christian world.” But Tocqueville does so with a constant eye on what endures in human nature and the nature of politics in the new democratic dispensation, and that in relation to what is new and what is to be welcomed and feared.