Some questionable stuff, but some very good stuff too. What struck foreign visitors as unusual about English speaking societies? All of you know that de Tocqueville wrote books about American democracy, its much less well known that he also wrote books about British democracy, he was married to an English woman and spent a lot of time in the UK, and although de Tocqueville is widely quoted, especially at conservative audiences, he is evidently not so widely read because although hes quoted as the supreme witness to American exceptionalism he makes very plain on page one of Democracy in America that he sees the English speaking world as a political continuum. He talks about how in the New World the characteristics of the Old World countries were exaggerated. Spanish America, as he saw it, exaggerated the ramshackle corruption of Phillips Spain. French America, the obscurantist seignorialism of Louis France. But English America, as he always called it, that, he believed, took further what we would now call the Libertarian or the individualist philosophy of the mother country. Tocqueville said The American is the Englishman left to himself. https://youtube/watch?v=5D7hFIy8enI
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 20:54:25 +0000
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