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Loading... Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau,…by Paul Anthony Rahe
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  bruchu | Jul 19, 2009 |   no reviews | add a review
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In 1989, the Cold War abruptly ended and it seemed as if the world was at last safe for democracy. But a spirit of uneasiness, discontent, and world-weariness soon arose and has persisted in Europe, in America, and elsewhere for two decades. To discern the meaning of this malaise we must investigate the nature of liberal democracy, says the author of this provocative book, and he undertakes to do so through a detailed investigation of the thinking of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Tocqueville.
Paul A. Rahe argues that these political thinkers anticipated the modern liberal republic's propensity to drift in the direction of “soft despotism”—a condition that arises within a democracy when paternalistic state power expands and gradually undermines the spirit of self-government. Such an eventuality, feared by Tocqueville in the nineteenth century, has now become a reality throughout the European Union, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. So Rahe asserts, and he explains what must be done to reverse this unfortunate trend.
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:10 -0400)
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Wikipedia in English
In this academic text, Paul A. Rahe analyzes the works of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Tocqueville and then attempts to apply their philosophies to the present context, specifically in France and the U.S.
The first half of the book is a close philological reading of Montesquieu's "The Spirit of Laws," Rousseau's "Social Contract," and Tocqueville's "On Democracy in America." In my opinion, Rahe is very good at deconstructing their individual philosophies and showing how they intersect. Ultimately, the analysis converges on Tocqueville's work during America's Age of Democracy and most of the synthesis is quite accurate.
It is in the application of Tocqueville's ideas of "tyranny of the majority" and "soft despotism" to the expansion of the state which in my opinion veers off course. Certainly his criticisms leveled against the expansion of the liberal state have some merit, but the way that Rahe presents them unfortunately reveals his neoliberal and libertarian prejudices.
As a textual analysis of Tocqueville's influential works about American Democracy, this book mostly achieves its objective. However, as an application to the modern context, it mostly falls flat. I still recommend it because of its exploration into this important subject. (