Something Alexis de Tocqueville said about the irritable patriotism of the Americans might be just as easily applied to his own political theory. One would gladly agree to praise much in Tocqueville's writings if one were occasionally permitted to be critical of him. This book serves as a much-needed reminder that he was not omniscient, that he did not get everything right in his visit to America, and that he was never unequivocally on the side of radical participatory democracy. Bringing Marx's critical thoughts on race to bear on Tocqueville's vision of America as the “absolute democracy,” this book focuses on the fascinating question of why Tocqueville and Marx saw America in such radically different ways—as the vanguard of democratic equality, on the one hand, or as the epitome of racial inequality, on the other. How can these two mutually exclusive critical visions be reconciled? This book's animating premise is every bit as promising as its execution is disappointing, at least with respect to Tocqueville.

The main problem is that rather than being a serious scholarly attempt to sort out the good, the bad, and the ugly in Tocqueville's life and writings, August Nimtz's Tocqueville is a straw man of Wizard-of-Oz-like proportions. The author castigates him for things he did not say and do, and then ignores well-known counterfactuals. For example, Nimtz asserts (citing only the authority of Seymour Drescher) that “Tocqueville comes close to being a land determinist” (p. 18), an allegation that flies in the face of his explicit dismissal of these ideas among his contemporaries as “false and cowardly doctrines,” likely to “produce feeble men and pusillanimous nations” (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, J. P. Mayer, ed., 1988, p. 705). But even if Tocqueville were indeed guilty of being something as abominable as a land determinist, what would distinguish this kind of thinking from the following representative passage by Nimtz himself? “[In contrast to Hamilton the Englishman], Tocqueville, owing to his class and national origins—the relatively underdeveloped character of France vis-à-vis Britain—had too many feet in the past to be fully cognizant of what was underway in the United States” (p. 29). Some of Nimtz's criticisms are purely conjectural, as in his contention that Tocqueville knew nothing about classical political economy and had no interest in economic questions (p. 29). Others are patently false, such as his overarching conceit that Tocqueville—unlike his friend Beaumont—is hampered by an “almost exclusive focus” on “political ‘institutions’” (p. 23). These not only ignore the dozens of chapters and hundreds of pages devoted to things like the family, women, the relationship between laborers and their employers, and the arts and letters in America, not to mention the contemporaneous Mémoire sur le paupérisme. They also miss the axial point of Democracy in America, namely, that the book is an effort to explore democracy as “un état social,” fully comprehensible only in terms of the moeurs and sentiments that breathe life into its political institutions. The author's only justification for ignoring this material is that “it's not always clear if [Tocqueville] referred specifically to the United States” in these chapters” (p. 17).

On the issue of race, Tocqueville's sins are allegedly those of commission as well as omission, while Marx can do no wrong. Whereas Nimtz bends over backward to apologize for Marx's use of grotesque racial epithets as “terms of affection” for his son-in-law Joseph Lafargue, he simply asserts that Tocqueville's “views on Blacks can only be described as racist” (pp. 18, 159). Never mind that neither of the two passages from Democracy in America cited in support of this accusation bears out Nimtz's attribution of an “essentialist opinion of race relations” to Tocqueville (p. 18). They say only that certain peoples and races have been disproportionately favored or burdened by historical circumstances, and that this will prove a hindrance to their freedom and equality in the future. By way of contrast, Marx's fascination with the scientific racism of Gobineau and others—for which Tocqueville sharply chided Gobineau, it should be remembered—are merely excusable “parts of the essentialist baggage that informed even the then most advanced ideas on the subject” (p. 161). The author acknowledges, almost as an afterthought, that Tocqueville “was clearly opposed to slavery,” but the mere fact that he is willing to reckon with the practical difficulties of putting an end to it somehow illogically means that he “comes close to being its apologist” (pp. 20, 19). This all rests on the supposition that Tocqueville—deeply entangled in the ongoing political struggles of France—could and should have done more in America to advance the cause of abolition (p. 60). That Tocqueville “failed to publicly identify with the abolitionists in America” may be a fair criticism (p. 196), although we might quibble that his writings on abolition in the French colonies were translated and published by American abolitionists, a fact that Nimtz notes only in passing (p. 59). I wonder whether Nimtz does not discount Tocqueville's sense of the enduring dilemma of race in America, which Tocqueville quite rightly and pessimistically predicted would not be resolved simply by the abolition of slavery. This distinction is blurred throughout the book.

The problems go deeper still, stemming from Nimtz's misunderstanding of two major conceptual issues in Tocqueville's treatment of America. First, despite being struck by its “equality of social conditions”—by which Tocqueville does not always mean actual, substantive equality—he is well aware that democratic America has its contradictions. “The surface of American society,” Tocqueville famously notes, “is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colors breaking through” (Tocqueville 1988, p. 49). Second, Nimtz fails to absorb the basic fact that Tocqueville was ambivalent about democracy, in America and elsewhere. What he characterizes as “Tocquevillean optimism about democracy in America” was experienced by Tocqueville himself as a kind of “religious dread” (p. 201). That he was an elitist and critical of mass democracy—two of his major sins in Nimtz's eyes—should come as no surprise to his readers. Indeed, rather than “cast[ing] doubts on his democratic credentials,” these antidemocratic aspects of Tocqueville's political theory are precisely what make him so endearing, for better or worse, to latter-day conservative interpreters (p. 196). On the positive side, the first two chapters are redeemed by interesting conjectures about what Marx may have drawn from Beaumont's, Tocqueville's, and Hamilton's respective portrayals of America in his “On the Jewish Question.”

The tragedy of Marx, Tocqueville and Race in America—and the thing that ultimately makes it worth reading—is that Chapters 3 and 4 on Marx and Engels are everything that the early chapters on Tocqueville are not: careful, detailed, subtle, and empathetic. The author recounts with grace, passion, and impeccable historical detail the unappreciated story of Marx's involvement in the cause of the American Civil War and his efforts in support of the abolition of slavery. Marx's and Engels's struggle to mobilize German-American workers in support of abolition and the Union cause is a fascinating study in the role of ideas and political agency in history. Nimtz draws from this story the important lesson that the Marxian doctrine of historical materialism need not mean that Marx and Engels were content just to sit back and allow the forces of history to carry the events of their day. Speech, action, and politics truly matter, a conclusion with which the real Tocqueville—as opposed to the caricature who appears in these pages—would wholeheartedly agree.