Tocqueville Between East and West

Reframing Tocqueville’s ideas through an Eastern lens: what democracy and freedom mean in China.

This book adopts an Eastern or Chinese perspective on Alexis de Tocqueville’s political thought, highlighting the aristocratic nature of his theory of freedom and how it would be understood by a nineteenth-century traveler from Europe to the East. What would that traveler see in China? What kind of freedom would be identified in Chinese social contexts? And how would Confucianism figure in today’s politics?

Tocqueville Between East and West departs from the usual present-day distinction between democracy and authoritarianism, to analyze how ideas of the equality of conditions have affected both China and the West, albeit in different forms. Duan here argues that the Tocquevillian spirit of democracy, although inevitable for human societies, is not an end but rather a condition according to which we must regularly adjust ourselves to stay free, whether in the West or the East.

Denim Duan is professor of politics at Peking University, China.