After Tocqueville: The Promise and Failure of Democracy
“With this book, Chilton Williamson advances to the top rank of American political and social thinkers. This is an extraordinary performance of a versatile novelist, political analyst, art critic, etc. His main thesis may be arguable, but only by people whose mental equipment and scholarship are at least close to the qualities Williamson demonstrates.” —JOHN LUKACS, author ofFive Days in LondonandDemocracy and Populism“Chilton Williamson has written the best book on democracy in the past hundred years.Capturing Tocqueville has developed into an intellectual sport, sides taken less on the merits of the French aristo’s prophecy that equality and democracy were everywhere gaining ground in the nineteenth century than on when and in what form the process will be completed. Williamson, in this learned and elegantly written book, has changed the rules of the game.” —JOHN WILLSON, professor emeritus of history, Hillsdale College“Is democracy good for people? Or nations? Can it survive George W. Bush’s ‘global democratic revolution’ or the ‘Arab Spring’? What, in any case, does democracy mean in an age of mass politics, mass culture, mass communications, not to say mass hysteria? Chilton Williamson tackles the horrors, contradictions, and absurdities of life after Tocqueville (and Fukuyama) ina book that is both immensely civilized and a cracking good read.” —STUART REID, former deputy editor of theSpectator(London)“At last a book that actually thinks about democracy—i.e., courageously dares address the Deity of our times. While referring to just about  everything that has been written about democracy in modern times—his culture seems as limitless as his modesty—Williamson adroitly nudges the  democratic reader to wonder whether he has ever been taught the right things about democracy. This book isa thought-provoking meditation one feels urged to take an active part in.” —CLAUDE POLIN, professor emeritus, University of Paris–Sorbonne“A comprehensive and continually stimulating studyof how we have entered a postdemocratic age which has subverted nearly everything that was valuable in American democracy as understood by Tocqueville.” —DONALD W. LIVINGSTON, professor emeritus of philosophy, Emory University