The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville

The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville places Tocqueville's political though in the context of his time and place, and shows why his ideas defy easy classification. Responding to the twentieth-century tendency to impose anachronistic political categories on Tocqueville, Roger Boesche reminds us that like Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, Lamartine, Flaubert, and other writers of his generation, he was a nineteenth-century Frenchman reacting to contemporary French concerns, aspirations, and anxieties.

Roger Boesche is Associate Professor of Political Science at Occidental College.

Roger Boesche's book offers a strikingly fresh way of looking at Tocqueville and fills a serious gap in American Tocqueville scholarship. It is a fascinating and full-blown interpretation of the French scene during the first half of the nineteenth century.