A thorough analysis of Tocqueville's thoughts on the lower classes of society, viewing his stances on slavery, poverty, criminality, and working class ...

Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery is a classic in the sense that it irreversyibly altered our most basic way of looking at an historical event. Writing the book in 1944, Williams broke with the century of histories portraying the British abolition of slavery as a humanist event, a moral victory. His account of slavery in the British colonies was innovative in introducing the notion that economic, rather than moral, factors were decisive in the motivation and success of the abolitionists. The (...) two farthest-reaching claims of Capitalism and Slavery are that British colonial slave production and the slave trade enabled the industrial revolution to take place in Britain, and that the abolition movement resulted solely from changes in the British imperial economy. Though few historians since Williams have agreed with him on the centrality of industrialization in the slave colonies and abolition, his work has resulted in the inclusion of economic factors in all recent accounts of slavery and its abolition. By writing a simplistic history with a global context, Williams made it impossible for subsequent historians to write about abolition as an isolated moral act of the British Empire. (shrink)

In Tocqueville Between Two Worlds, Sheldon Wolin offers a challenging reinterpretation of Tocqueville as a political thinker. Among Wolin’s major themes is a novel concept of the place of 'aristocracy' in Tocqueville's theory and practice of politics. Wolin asserts that, contrary to scholarly consensus, Tocqueville was engaged in a lifelong pursuit of anciennete, the retrieval of a rapidly disappearing aristocratic past in order to counteract new forms of despotism. However, a careful analysis of the whole range of Tocqueville’s theoretical works (...) and political action leads one to the opposite conclusion. None of his major works appears to corroborate Wolin's thesis. Both Tocqueville's theory and practice were deeply informed by a contrasting premise. The only possible means of sustaining modern liberty and avoiding, or curing, modern despotism lay in a wholehearted acceptance of the irretrievable triumph of modern democracy and its distinctive political institutions. (shrink)

Exploring the economic, cultural and political role of slavery in different societies, this volume includes selections from historians, economists and contemporaries - from those enslaved as well as from free members of slave owning societies.