Paul Rahe believes that America and more generally modern liberal democracy is in decline, and he is not happy about it. To those who think that the modern Western model of politics and economics must accept in the twenty-first century the rise of the rest, and thus fade—or has a moral duty to do so—Rahe responds with historical and philosophical pugnacity. He turns to seminal philosophers of modernity and liberalism to argue that if we sense disintegration or confusion in our political and social order, and uneasiness about liberal modernity, the fault lies with our myopia and other choices. Later thinkers insistent upon propelling modernity to new or postmodern vistas do not adequately study the philosophical origins of the liberal, commercial republic and the causes of its rise to global dominance, thus taking for granted the very liberty and leisure they enjoy. This is a dissent, obviously, from the views predominant in academia and broader intellectual circles in the liberal democracies, and one wonders whether many will test their convictions and their mettle against this learned but also polemical work.

Rahe argues that our amnesia is most evident in the decline of the philosopher Montesquieu from acknowledged architect of liberal political science and constitutionalism to academic exotica. Yet Montesquieu and his successors Rousseau and Tocqueville provide the best understanding of liberal modernity's political psychology, from its culture of liberty that produces unprecedented prosperity and military might to its concomitant tendencies toward moral disorder, internal conflict, and self-doubt. Moreover, Tocqueville's prediction of the rise in modern democracy of a new, mild despotism by the administrative state originates, according to Rahe's intellectual archaeology, in the assessments by Montesquieu and Rousseau of the anxiety and turbulence affecting liberal man, since Tocqueville predicted the state's claim to assuage such insecurities. If we wish to understand ourselves and our politics we should follow Tocqueville who, while writing Democracy in America, recorded that he pondered Montesquieu and Rousseau (and also Pascal) each day. For Rahe this entails a journey beyond terrain approved by Rawlsian, postmodern, or historicist political theory today. The philosophical historian explores the realities of battles or technological prowess alongside the insights of philosophers about human nature and justice. In one very Montesquieuan moment he connects these three philosophers on a more human scale by praising Tocqueville's great-grandfather Malesherbes—admirer of Montesquieu's moderate liberalism, liberal protector under the monarchy of Rousseau's outlandish writings, and patriarch of a family committed to truth and justice. Throughout this journey Rahe endorses Tocqueville's claim, in turn supported by Montesquieu, that the modern liberal republic is exceptional in providing liberty, equality, and conditions for public and private justice. It now should be cajoled to turn from its indulgent, self-destructive angst and instead appreciate its philosophical and political heritage.

Soft Despotism adopts the spirit of Montesquieu and Tocqueville in synthesizing the inquiries academia now demarcates as intellectual history and political philosophy. It thus is a sequel to Rahe's Republics Ancient and Modern (1992), but it also echoes the spirit of a Thucydides, Livy, or Tacitus—a moral and political accounting of free government, its ideals, and its darker or even self-destructive intellectual and political tendencies. As with his earlier opus Rahe's work features close readings of an array of classic texts, with copious and dense footnotes to pursue a Socratic debate with other scholars. Perhaps its greatest contribution is to restore Montesquieu's place as indispensable for understanding our world, as not merely a French version of Locke but as providing a new philosophical framework for liberalism. (Rahe further emphasizes this in the companion volume Yale is publishing, Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty, 2009). Montesquieu's political science provides, he argues, the real foundation for globalized liberal modernity and also the philosophical context for Rousseau and Tocqueville. If one wishes to understand these dominant phenomena of recent centuries, and these latter, more widely studied philosophers, one must study the master who predicted, guided, inspired, and challenged the new conceptions of soul, city, and philosopher. Rahe explains that Montesquieu was no Anglophile, for he saw (as his two successors noted well) both the achievements and flaws of modern commercial or bourgeois liberty. Nonetheless, he hoped that it or another modern Carthage could repel the quest for a revived Roman Empire that animates not only absolutist monarchy but also, as Montesquieu prophesied and subsequent centuries in fact endured, other absolutist quests. Rahe portrays all three philosophers as shaped by their immediate context and historical tradition, but he insists, pace the Cambridge School of Pocock and Skinner, that their insights rise above historical conditions and thereby shape future thoughts and deeds.

Tocqueville garners Rahe's highest esteem for learning from philosophic predecessors while also discerning new conditions and trends in liberal modernity that demand new thoughts. His demonstration of Rousseau's deep debt to Montesquieu is a great advance in scholarship, but Rahe largely appreciates Rousseau for his warnings on the self-destructive strain in modern liberty and philosophy. He more broadly endorses the constructive efforts of Montesquieu and Tocqueville. If Montesquieu provides the philosophical context of liberal modernity and Rousseau exploits its every weakness, Tocqueville adapts elements from each philosopher as well as from classical and medieval philosophy to provide the most accurate prognosis of the liberal project. This is not the Tocqueville celebrated in recent decades as the great prophet of democratic political culture and its global expansion. Rahe instead emphasizes the praise in Democracy in America for local government and civic responsibility, for Christianity as undergirding these and other modes of liberty, for the traditional family and private associations, and for constitutional complexity in federalism and the high offices of president, Senate, and federal courts. All of these measures for moderating democracy are, he argues, further developments of Montesquieu's liberalism that reveal Tocqueville's debt to classical and medieval thought. Rahe rebuts recent criticisms that Democracy is not democratic enough by noting the prescience of Tocqueville's warning about the intellectual and political extremes to which egalitarianism is prone. The main threat is a soft despotism adopted by the majority for its promises to administer new distributions of equal material security, at the willing price of eclipsing local and national liberty and also of retreating from a robust defense of national interests and liberal democracy abroad. Rahe laments that this threat fully materialized in the twentieth century, first in Europe and now in America.

This fulfillment of Tocqueville's dark prophecy propels Rahe to openly polemical moments, condemning this drift and offering a program to reverse it. He finds justification for this stance in his assessment of Democracy as in fact a “muted polemic” (222) aimed at jarring Tocqueville's French compatriots to turn from their self-destructive quarrels and learn from a more successful liberal order. Nonetheless, Rahe understands that neither Montesquieu nor Tocqueville, whose moderate liberal philosophy he would re-introduce to his compatriots today, was so directly polemical as he ventures to be here. Indeed, such moments in Rahe's work transcend the moral tone of the classical historians to channel the spirit of a Rousseau when excoriating those fallen away from his (newfangled) conception of republican virtue. The closing chapters berate France (and now the European Union) for failing to adopt Tocqueville's conception of moderate, constitutional liberalism, and condemn American progressives for zealously pursuing soft despotism itself—right up to the current plans of the Democratic Party for national health care (which were passed into law after Rahe's book was published). Rahe's studies of republicanism across three millennia suggest to him that modern republican liberty is now in grave peril, and the philosophic moderation of a Montesquieu is inapt. Nor can he adopt the standard Tocqueville set in Democracy, to rise above polemic and the contest of the parties, for now the postmodern philosophies of pragmatism and relativism control academia and the major media. Because these schools repudiate the exceptionalism of modern liberal democracy and lack the spirit that would resist the decline of its liberty, dissenters must rally and awaken minds that might be open to seeing the danger. Nonetheless, a Montesquieuan and Tocquevillean spirit might ask whether conservative and libertarian polemics will persuade the late-modern liberal mind to rediscover the achievements of moderate liberalism, especially the American model of liberal democratic constitutionalism that is its greatest achievement. If the essence of Montesquieuan and Tocquevillean liberalism is intellectual and political moderation, the avoidance of extremes of belief and action, then can the cause of reintroducing Montesquieu and reconsidering Tocqueville be advanced by pugnacity?

Rahe's volume does the further service, then, of exposing this dilemma regarding how to break through the amnesia of the late-modern liberal era without reinforcing its disdain for those backward minds that have not yet caught the wave of egalitarian and perpetually self-constructed liberation. Perhaps scholars of these three philosophers and more broadly of republicanism and liberalism will engage Rahe's work, and in their responses be challenged to formulate a better conception of liberalism, or a more moderate one.