Demin Duan’s imaginative Tocqueville between East and West is a two-fold contribution: to the ever-growing literature on Tocqueville in East Asia and to more wide-ranging discussions of the possibility of a distinctively Chinese form of democratic liberty. What links these contributions is Duan’s acute sense that contemporary China shares Tocqueville’s point de départ, to use a Tocquevillian term. Like Tocqueville’s France, China has inherited a powerful centralized state and lives with the legacy of a shattering series of revolutions. Like Tocqueville, many Chinese are struggling to create a stable and free society based on a thorough-going equality of condition, even as they mistrust the language of universalist liberalism. Without losing a sense of the differences between French and Chinese society and history, exemplified in his nuanced chapter on the nature of their revolutions, Duan attempts to chart a Tocquevillian way forward.

The book begins in an unconventional way with a chapter on Tocqueville’s writings on French imperialism. Stressing Tocqueville’s alleged affinity with a neo-Roman view of republican liberty rather than any theory of universal human rights, Duan argues that Tocqueville was an untroubled realist who recognized that France could not remain a great power without colonies. Critics who find Tocqueville’s imperialism in some tension with Democracy in America are thus misguided. One should instead read the writings on Algeria as part of Tocqueville’s central theoretical concern: a meditation on the ways in which the lack of local self-government and absence of administrative decentralization bequeathed by history frustrated France’s efforts to create liberty at home or colonies abroad. Tocqueville was sensitive to these political deficits because his concept of freedom—unlike that of the progressive J. S. Mill, for example—was rooted in an aristocratic sensibility attuned to the novel ways that hierarchical moeurs can bolster a free way of life. The next chapter, “Aristocrat in Democracy,” explores this theme in a way that Tocqueville scholars will likely find more familiar than novel; it is well-trodden if still controversial territory.

A transitional chapter (“Déjà vu: Tocqueville in China”) explores the resonance of Tocqueville for non-Western audiences. Duan notes that Tocqueville’s comparative method can reach deeply into different cultures and social contexts precisely because it creates an effect like an intellectual mirror. “[Tocqueville] is already in China. That is to say, his method enables us to use the local vernacular to conduct similar intellectual journeys regarding different countries and customs, as well as human beings in general” (78). The chapter concludes with a sensitive discussion of Tocqueville’s view of the possible role of religion in supporting freedom in a democratic society. When freed from state manipulation, religion can restrain behavior, orient people toward a common good, and mediate inevitable conflicts. This discussion, Duan argues, resonates in a particular way in modern China where “the vast majority of the population are imbued with traditional Confucian culture and values” (89). Confucianism “embodies a system of faith that guides their lives” (91) and nurtures a particular sense of the duties of members of a community. Beginning in the 1980s, as the ripples of the Cultural Revolution died out, communities imbued with Confucian values (families, professors and students, and associations of many other sorts) re-emerged in China. These communities, in which the “weaker” parties have morally justifiable claims, “are the deposit of freedoms in contemporary China” (95).They are the functional counterparts to the associations that Tocqueville valued in America in two ways: first, they serve the same purposes of connecting and empowering atomized individuals and thus forming a certain kind of barrier to authority; and second, state authority must “adjust its policies in order not to appear extremely unjustified in the face of all these ‘middle powers’” (96).

Two fascinating chapters—“People and Hierarchy: Confucianism in Today’s China” and “Another Form of Representation”—explore these claims in more depth. Duan argues that in a society in which equality of social conditions is an accomplished reality, Confucianism can be effectual only if indirectly exercised in mores, rather than directly entangled with state power in any institutional form. The hierarchical aspects of Confucianism, moreover, must be resolutely accepted as constitutive of its moral force. The chapter on representation defends the view that state authority in China—in the form of the National People’s Congress and the Communist Party itself—has taken a “representative turn” (141). In asserting that it represents the people, rather than acts as its vanguard, the Party makes claims about the content of the common good that can be contested, though not always via elections. Rather, such claims are made, and potentially can be challenged, on the basis of “high values” that help to constitute something recognizable as a deliberative public sphere.

Duan’s use of Tocqueville to bolster his analysis does not always persuade. Let me give one example. In his discussion of the Algerian writings, Duan does not distinguish clearly enough between Tocqueville’s analysis of state relations with the European settler colony (an analysis aligned with his critique of French centralization) and his treatment of relations with the Arab population. It is true that Tocqueville’s view of the necessities of war and conquest is ultimately governed by realpolitik and the primacy of national interest, but his view is not—pace Duan—unconflicted. Indeed, Duan’s own understanding of the way that “high values” provide a horizon of criticism in China might have been used to elucidate Tocqueville’s attitude toward French domination of the Arabs. Tocqueville hoped that a milder and more humane form of imperial rule that took account of Arab interests would prevail, but his intermittent realization that this hope was illusory troubled his conscience. In the words of Françoise Mélonio, for Tocqueville, “[national interest] includes the preservation of honor.”Footnote ¹ Tocqueville feared that his country’s honor and his own would suffer—as did the honor of the Anglo-Americans in the United States and the English in Ireland—because of their treatment of the conquered.

This is not the only quarrel one might have with Duan’s interpretation of Tocqueville. And no doubt his attempts to articulate and defend what some may see as an unacceptably authoritarian form of freedom in China will also occasion debate. But such criticisms do not lessen his achievement. Well versed in the traditions of political theory in both West and East, Demin Duan has written an original, erudite, and provocative book that deserves to be widely read and discussed.