This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, October 20th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What can Alexis to Togeville, that keen observer of American life and habits in the 19th century tell us about the world today.

In his book The Art of Being Free, how Alexis to Tocville can save us from ourselves, James

Poulos reshapes Tocville for a modern audience and offers Tocville's lessons for a life well lived.

Why is Tocville so notable among Americans?

Tocville is not your run-of-the-mill European political theorist.

One of the strange things about American political theory in the academy and then trickling out from the academy is how much of it is dependent on these these

resolutely European thinkers who you you know, as far as I'm concerned, are oftentimes

primarily concerned with specifically European problems of political theory, political theology, economics.

Tocville understood that what was happening

in America in the mid-1800s was something new. He said we needed a new political science for a world

itself quite new. But he came at that problem or at that opportunity as a social

theorist and even more importantly as a social theorist.

And even more importantly, as a young person

who had lived pretty hard.

He was an experienced guy.

He wrote Democracy in America Young.

He died young.

Mortality haunted him. he was deeply aware in a personal

way of the ineffable sort of melancholy and unsettledness of life and he saw a whole

nation of people sort of immersed in that crazy unsettled anxious restlessness.

...