Triple-alienated man. Identity in a time of historical transition -- Class: between two worlds -- Intimacy -- Ambition -- Melancholy -- Skeptical romantic -- Skeptical philosophe -- Skepticism and religion: "Une ombre vaine" -- Doubt and the will to believe -- Exile: voiceless in Cannes -- The calling of politics. Vocation: politics as calling, Tocqueville's "Beau Reve" -- Vocation: the responsibilities of political leaders -- The Dead Sea of politics -- Tocqueville's aristocratic liberalism -- Writing Democracy in America. A moral landscape -- A moral history -- Escape -- The new world: fable, romance, history -- Tocqueville in the wilderness -- Transformations -- Beginning Democracy in America -- Influences: voices in the tower -- Writing as moral act -- History as moral drama -- The birth of a book -- Tocqueville's America. Tocqueville's American notebooks and Democracy in America -- Traveling through the New Republic with Tocqueville and Beaumont -- Democratic religion: mad messiahs and chaste women -- Class in an egalitarian society -- Born-again American: the creation of an American identity -- Politics: order and disorder in the New Republic -- A dark vision of democracy's prospects -- The democratic psyche and the hazards of equality -- A culture of extremes: the prospects for freedom in a culture without limits -- A brief chronological narrative of the life of Alexis de Tocqueville.
Summary
Kaledin offers an original combination of biography, character study and wide-ranging analysis of Toqueville's 'Democracy in America', bringing new light to that classic work.
