Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Tocqueville in the Twenty-First Century
- 1 Tocqueville’s Comparative Perspectives
- 2 Tocqueville on 1789: Preconditions, Precipitants, and Triggers
- 3 Tocqueville’s New Political Science
- 4 Tocqueville, Political Philosopher
- 5 Tocqueville’s Democracy in America Reconsidered
- 6 Translating Tocqueville: The Constraints of Classicism
- 7 The Writer Engagé: Tocqueville and Political Rhetoric
- 8 The Shifting Puzzles of Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revolution
- 9 Tocqueville and Civil Society
- 10 Tocqueville on Threats to Liberty in Democracies
- 11 Tocqueville on Democratic Religious Experience
- 12 Tocqueville on Fraternity and Fratricide
- 13 Tocqueville and the French
- 14 Tocqueville and the Americans: Democracy in America as Read in Nineteenth-Century America
- Bibliography
- Index
- Series List
6 - Translating Tocqueville: The Constraints of Classicism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 January 2007
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Tocqueville in the Twenty-First Century
- 1 Tocqueville’s Comparative Perspectives
- 2 Tocqueville on 1789: Preconditions, Precipitants, and Triggers
- 3 Tocqueville’s New Political Science
- 4 Tocqueville, Political Philosopher
- 5 Tocqueville’s Democracy in America Reconsidered
- 6 Translating Tocqueville: The Constraints of Classicism
- 7 The Writer Engagé: Tocqueville and Political Rhetoric
- 8 The Shifting Puzzles of Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revolution
- 9 Tocqueville and Civil Society
- 10 Tocqueville on Threats to Liberty in Democracies
- 11 Tocqueville on Democratic Religious Experience
- 12 Tocqueville on Fraternity and Fratricide
- 13 Tocqueville and the French
- 14 Tocqueville and the Americans: Democracy in America as Read in Nineteenth-Century America
- Bibliography
- Index
- Series List
Summary
THE CLASSIC
Nearly everyone will grant that Tocqueville's Democracy in America deserves to be called a ''classic.'' Does the work's classic status constrain its translator? Should it? And if so, how? These are the questions I want to address.
Tocqueville wrote as the self-conscious heir of a long intellectual tradition of writing about politics. Though never a systematic student of the ancient classics, he is known to have consulted Plato, Aristotle, and Plutarch during the period in which he wrote Democracy in America. He also read ''classic'' writers of the postclassical tradition such as Aquinas, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Pascal, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. His early education owed a great deal to his tutor, the Abbé Lesueur. Lesueur, who had also been his father's tutor, was a man who belonged more to the eighteenth century than to the nineteenth, and who wrote an elegant French in the manner of that earlier time. When the young Tocqueville won a prize in rhetoric at the Metz lycée, he credited the preparation received from his tutor. The good Abbé, moreover, was an ecclesiastic with Jansenist leanings, who probably imparted the values of that austerely cerebral sect to his pupil, and we know that Pascal, the most sparkling of Jansenist writers, remained an important influence on Tocqueville's thinking.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville , pp. 139 - 166Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
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