Olivier Zunz, Commonwealth Professor of History at
the University of Virginia, is the author of Philanthropy in
America: A History and editor of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave
de Beaumont in America: Their Friendship and Their Travels
(Virginia), among other books.
Arthur Goldhammer, an affiliate of the Center for
European Studies at Harvard University and a member of the
editorial board of French Politics, Culture, and Society, has
translated more than one hundred and twenty-five works from the
French, including Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and The Ancien
Régime and the French Revolution.
Recollections contains Tocqueville's thoughts "in the raw" as a
participant in the upheavals that shook France between 1848 and
1853. --Samuel Gregg "Liberty and Law"
Recollections is unique among Tocqueville's major writings. In this
devastating chronicle of the failures of friends and foes in the
Revolution of 1848, he abandons the distance of his more analytical
writings to reveal his candid reactions to the ultimate moral and
political challenge of his time. We now have the definitive English
edition: beautifully presented by Olivier Zunz, punctuated by the
satirical sketches of Daumier, and wonderfully translated by Arthur
Goldhammer. Capturing the stylistic brilliance of Tocqueville as
immediate political portraitist and juge de soi, this new version
of the Recollections also reminds us that some firsthand accounts
of collective crisis can speak across time and culture. Like the
best of political novels, they expand our sense of the
possibilities and limitations of our own political world.--Cheryl
Welch, Harvard University, editor of The Cambridge Companion to
Tocqueville
A shrewd, on-the-ground account of how political change is
made--and unmade--by the author of Democracy in America.... [T]he
author is seemingly incapable of writing a dull sentence.... In
many ways as relevant as the day it was written and great fun to
read.-- "Kirkus Reviews"
Edited by Olivier Zunz and flawlessly translated by Arthur
Goldhammer, Tocqueville's Recollections is now available in a
nicely illustrated new edition. [I]n addition to the text itself
and its various appendices, Zunz has added just short of a hundred
pages of correspondence, speeches and occasional writings penned or
delivered by Tocqueville in the period stretching from the birth of
the Second Republic until its overthrow in December 1851. These
welcome additions allow us not only to assess Tocqueville's
political interventions but also to observe his shift in mood from
relative optimism to profound pessimism.-- "Standpoint
Magazine"
Goldhammer's is the first English translation to do justice to
Tocqueville's original uncensored masterpiece of analytical
description, stylistic subtlety, vivid social panorama, and
incisive critique of political blundering and cowardice. Zunz's
introduction--and his addition of several of Tocqueville's
ancillary speeches, occasional texts, and letters--round out a
unique volume that significantly enhances our understanding of the
revolutionary period and Tocqueville's role in it.-- "Institute for
Advanced Studies and Culture"
This is the definitive English edition of Tocqueville's
Recollections. It has been splendidly edited and introduced by
Olivier Zunz, who has chosen key documents from Tocqueville and
others to accompany this greatest of all French political memoirs.
And it has been marvelously translated by Tocqueville's greatest
English translator, Arthur Goldhammer. Tocqueville is a difficult
writer to render into English. He is subtle, nuanced, ironic, and
many earlier generations of French thought and literature breathe
through his prose. Goldhammer captures it all, while explaining his
approach in a luminous essay on Tocqueville's style.--David A.
Bell, Lapidus Professor, Princeton University, author of Shadows of
Revolution: Reflections on France, Past and Present
Zunz has had a long fascination with Tocqueville, in part because
of their shared mission. Both are French and both try to understand
America. Zunz, as a historian of America, has written Philanthropy
in America: A History, Why the American Century?Making America
Corporate, 1870-1920, and The Changing Face of Inequality. Zunz
frequently cites Tocqueville, whom he regards as something of a
lifelong companion-- "UVa Today"
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