Acts of reading past texts are always time- and space-bound interpretations and, as one of my teachers Hans-Georg Gadamer liked to remark, all such interpretations of past texts turn out to be misinterpretations. Just as walking is a pale imitation of dancing, and dancing an exaggerated form of walking, so interpretations frame past realities. Hemmed in by language and horizons of time and space, reading is always a stylising of past reality. Readers like to say that they have ‘really grasped’ the intended meanings of dead authors, whose texts belong to a context, but ‘full disclosure’ of that kind is forbidden to the living. There are no ‘true’ and ‘faithful’ readings of what others have written. How should we make sense of these conflicting interpretations? Each arguably suffers serious flaws, but at the outset it’s important to recognise that the act of reading past texts is always an exercise in selection. They think of Democracy in America in almost nationalist terms: for them, it is a lavish hymn to the United States, a celebration of its emerging authority in the world, an ode to its 19th-century greatness and future 20th-century global dominance. Some observers, very often American, push this interpretation to the limit. More often, the text is treated as a brilliant grand commentary on the decisive historical significance for old Europe of the rise of the new American republic, which was soon to become a world empire. Some readers of the text treat its author as a ‘ classical liberal’ who loved parliamentary government and loathed the extremes of democracy.
Some observers cautiously mine the text for its fresh insights on such perennial themes as liberty of the press, the tyranny of the majority and civil society or they focus on such topics as why it is that modern democracies are vulnerable to ‘commercial panics’ and why they simultaneously value equality, reduce the threat of revolution and grow complacent. Its daring conjectures, elegant prose, formidable length and narrative complexity make it a masterpiece, yet exactly those qualities have together ensured, through time, that opinions greatly differ about the roots of its greatness. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale UniversityĪlexis de Tocqueville’s four-volume Democracy in America (1835-1840) is commonly said to be among the greatest works of nineteenth-century political writing. The young aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, sketch by an unknown artist.
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