From the socialist French President Mitterand to conservative President George W. Bush, seemingly everyone wants to claim Tocqueville. Unique among writers, with the possible exception of Orwell, Tocqueville is so famous for his insights into democracy that a passage from his writings apparently lends luster to anyone's argument. Who, then, is this man beloved by intellectuals and politicians alike? Hugh Brogan tries to answer this question by offering us a new, comprehensive biography of Tocqueville.

Brogan proceeds chronologically, beginning with an excellent job of untangling the web of Tocqueville's noble family, a family that could claim nobility back to at least 1425. Tocqueville's great-grandfather was the great Lamoignon de Malesherbes, the defender of Louis XVI, and eventually a victim of the revolution himself. Tocqueville's parents were imprisoned as suspect Royalists for ten months, but were saved after the fall of Robespierre.

With fine use of primary sources, Brogan allows us to see Tocqueville growing up under the Bourbon Restoration, observing the Revolution of 1830, swearing allegiance to Louis Philippe, and then, with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, making a journey to North America, ostensibly to study penitentiaries, but actually to see the fledgling American democracy. Back home in France, Tocqueville and Beaumont (mostly Beaumont) wrote their book on penitentiaries, and then Tocqueville published the first part of Democracy in America (1835) to great acclaim. Soon after, Tocqueville entered into politics and was elected to the Chamber of Deputies (1839), almost exactly when he finished the second part of Democracy in America (1840), which was less of a popular success.

Tocqueville's political life was less fruitful than his literary life, although he did argue powerfully for the abolition of slavery in French colonies, became an authority on prison reform, and tried to find a liberal to moderate niche in the very narrow politics of the Chamber of Deputies during the July Monarchy (1830–1848). (Only about 3% of adult male citizens could vote by the end of the July monarchy.) Brogan guides his readers through Tocqueville's January 1848 speech predicting a revolution in France, the revolution itself in February 1848, Tocqueville's election to the Constituent Assembly in April and then the bloody June Days of 1848. We also see Tocqueville elected to the Legislative Assembly of the Second Republic, his appointment to be minister of foreign affairs, his struggle to find a constitutional way for Louis Napoleon to serve a second term as president, and finally Louis Napoleon's coup d'état on 2 December 1851, when Tocqueville and other members of the Legislative Assembly were briefly put under arrest. Forced out of political life, Tocqueville turned to finish his Recollections about the events of 1848 to 1851, and then he embarked on his great but unfinished study of the French Revolution of which we have only the first volume, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856).

To escort us through all the events of Tocqueville's life and the key people he met or reacted to, Brogan relied mainly on the Oeuvres complètes d'Alexis de Tocqueville, which began publication under J. P. Mayer in 1951 and is still incomplete. This publication has many volumes of notes, speeches, and unfinished works, and perhaps most valuable of all, there are some fifteen volumes of Tocqueville's correspondence. Brogan also made excellent use of the archives at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, as well as the Archives Départmentales de la Manche. He used very little of Tocqueville scholarship from the last two decades.

Brogan's is a comprehensive biography, but he does omit some important subjects. While Brogan briefly discusses Tocqueville's support for the French conquest of Algeria, which he attributes to Tocqueville's nationalism, he fails to analyze Tocqueville's support for European imperialism that would allegedly civilize and enlighten the peoples of Africa and Asia. Of British rule in India, Tocqueville wrote to a friend, “Your title to govern these savages is that you are better than they are.” Surprisingly, Brogan also leaves out any discussion of Tocqueville's unfinished booklet entitled L'Inde, notes and analyses that Tocqueville worked on for many years.

Also, Brogan mentions but does not delve into an undertaking that was very important to Tocqueville. From June 1844 to late spring 1845, Tocqueville controlled a liberal newspaper called Le Commerce, a newspaper that brought him into opposition with leading political figures such as Guizot and Thiers (and also brought a painful temporary break with Beaumont). While Tocqueville saw himself as fighting for the principles of 1789 against those who supported the Bourbon Restoration or Napoleon's empire, he also defended local democracy and help for an exploited working class. To Tocqueville, this newspaper adventure was a bold endeavor designed to bring about significant reform under the July Monarchy. That Brogan did not read Tocqueville's Le Commerce is unfortunate, because this newspaper illustrates what Tocqueville really meant by applying the principles of 1789.

Because Tocqueville is political theorist, political observer, historian, and historical actor all in one, one must read Tocqueville's works with an understanding of his historical context. Brogan's book definitely helps provide this context, but I confess to being startled the moment I read the book jacket, which says that Brogan's work is “the first full-length biography of Tocqueville in English.” The claim is false. André Jardin published the first full-length biography of Tocqueville in 1984, and it was translated into English and published in 1988 as simply Tocqueville: A Biography. Brogan himself graciously acknowledges places in his text where he has relied on Jardin.

Like many before him, Brogan has difficulty classifying Tocqueville as a political thinker, precisely because Tocqueville's political thought defies classification using modern political categories. On various pages of his book, Brogan describes Tocqueville as “a republican” (208), “a fellow traveler of legitimism” (264), someone who wanted “to launch a new kind of liberalism” (278), “a new kind of legitimist” (358), “a noble to his fingertips” (366), “an active, improving conservative” (390), an “earnest liberal”(411), and “a very conservative liberal” (474). This list does not help the reader. Brogan fails to distinguish between Tocqueville, the political theorist, and Tocqueville, the historical and political actor. As a politician during the July Monarchy, Tocqueville had to make choices among political alternatives, all of which he found more or less distasteful. One unfairly labels him based on these choices, but this is what Brogan has done. This is why he can say that Tocqueville's political thought was almost the same as that of Guizot (385), but can any student of Tocqueville really imagine him saying, as did Guizot, “Enrichissez vous!” urging the middle classes to pursue property and power? That, however, is really Brogan's mistaken thesis, that Tocqueville wanted a new kind of limited liberalism, led by “notables” (302) like Tocqueville himself who would become a benevolent “governing elite” (278). But what happened to participatory democracy and active associations? In Brogan's opinion, it is not that these goals were impossible to achieve in Tocqueville's time, but Brogan apparently maintains that Tocqueville never really wanted them anyway.

Brogan has written a good biography of Tocqueville in terms of the times in which he lived and the details of Tocqueville's personal life, such as his illness, marriage, and friendships. However, the book is weakest when Brogan tries to talk about political ideas. For example, whereas Brogan is absolutely right to emphasize how important Chateaubriand and Guizot were in shaping Tocqueville's life and thought, he fails to convey in a clear and concise manner how exactly these two important thinkers influenced Tocqueville.

After reading Brogan, one might well wonder why anyone still pays attention to Democracy in America. Brogan appears frustrated and confused about Tocqueville's approach. He concludes, in regard to the first part of Democracy, that Tocqueville had a “neurotic refusal to plan his book carefully” (260). In regard to the second part of Democracy, Brogan has very little good to say about this great book of democratic and political theory. In the middle of his discussion, he proclaims that Tocqueville's “book is shaped as much by personal neurosis as by logic and observation” (361).

We might consider one example of Brogan's poor understanding of ideas. When discussing Tocqueville's theory of a new despotism, for example, Brogan says Tocqueville's model is a “Napoleonic dictatorship” (357). But nowhere in Tocqueville's discussion of his theory of a qualitatively new despotism does he mention either military rule or a one-person dictatorship. Tocqueville's fear was of a tyranny without a tyrant, something like Weber's dread of a suffocating bureaucratic domination, which Arendt rightly described as Rule by Nobody.

On the whole, Brogan regards the second part of Democracy as mostly unoriginal; but how does he reconcile this estimation with the claim by John Stuart Mill that Tocqueville, in finishing Democracy in America, had “changed the face of political philosophy?” (368) And all the other people who remain fascinated by Tocqueville's Democracy? Furthermore, what Brogan has decided not to discuss from both parts of Democracy is astonishing. Where is his discussion of New England townships and participatory democracy? Why has he omitted a detailed discussion of associations? What happened to Tocqueville's warning about an aristocracy of manufacturers and a debilitating division of labor? If one compares Brogan's discussion of Tocqueville's Democracy to a similar discussion in Jardin's biography of Tocqueville, Brogan's is much the weaker.

Brogan also makes some small mistakes. He writes that Marx says somewhere “revolutions come in two phases, the beautiful and the ugly” (432). In fact, there is no such quotation, although in Marx's The Class Struggles in France, Marx does call the February 1848 Revolution “nice” and labels the June 1848 Revolution “ugly” in a paragraph dripping with satire. Brogan also says that Marx mentions Tocqueville only in his Eighteenth Brumaire, as a representative arrested after Louis Napoleon's coup. In fact, as most political theorists know, in his On the Jewish Question, Marx quotes from Beaumont's Marie, or Slavery in the United States and refers to Tocqueville's Democracy in America as illustrating a country that has attained “full political emancipation” but not “human emancipation.”

Brogan's biography certainly helps us understand Tocqueville's personal life as well as the political and historical events enveloping Tocqueville, but Brogran's grasp of Tocqueville's ideas does not match his grasp of history.