Synopses & Reviews
In 1831, Alexis De Tocqueville, a twenty-six-year-old French aristocrat, spent nine months travelling across the United States. From the East Coast to the frontier, from the Canadian border to New Orleans, Tocqueville observed the American people and the revolutionary country they'd created. His celebrated
Democracy in America, the most quoted work on America ever written, presented the new Americans with a degree of understanding no one had accomplished before or has since. Astonished at the pace of daily life and stimulated by people at all levels of society, Tocqueville recognized that Americans were driven by a series of internal conflicts: simultaneously religious and materialistic; individualistic and yet deeply involved in community affairs; isolationist and interventionist; pragmatic and ideological.
Noted author Michael Ledeen takes a fresh look at Tocqueville's insights into our national psyche and asks whether Americans' national character, which Tocqueville believed to be wholly admirable, has fallen into moral decay and religious indifference.
Michael Ledeen's sparkling new exploration has some surprising answers and provides a lively new look at a time when character is at the center of our national debate.
Review
"
Machiavelli on Modern Leadership slaps modern society across the face with ancient truths about human nature and power. Its honesty takes your breath away and its many stories ring true." --Philip K. Howard, author of
The Death of Common Sense"To illustrate his ideas, Machiavelli made it a practice to give two examples, one ancient and one 'fresh.' With a firm grasp on American contemporary domestic and foreign policy, Michael Ledeen has provided what readers of Machiavelli need today-modern or 'fresh' examples. Machiavelli on Modern Leadership goes beyond the Medicis and the Borgias, reaching for intelligent and courageous examples in the corrupt worlds of modern government, business, the armed forces, and religion, to reveal that Machiavelli's warnings are hammering on the door of the twenty-first century." --Sebastian de Grazia, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Machiavelli in Hell
Synopsis
Following the success of Machiavelli on Modern Leadership, Ledeen now brings to life Tocqueville's profound understanding of American character. We are the most revolutionary people on earth, and Tocqueville was the first to understand the powerful emotional and spiritual forces that give us our amazing energy. We are at once the most religious and the most secular, the most individualistic and the most collective, the most idealistic and the most materialistic people in the world. Ledeen updates Tocqueville with contemporary examples, from General Electric's Jack Welch and Thomas Edison to George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, from Supreme Court pronouncements to the anti-smoking crusade. In short, the great Frenchman's incisive portrait of American spirit remains as important today for America's understanding of itself as it was nearly two centuries ago.
About the Author
Michael A. Ledeen, a noted political analyst, is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of
Machiavelli on Modern Leadership and is a contributor to
The Wall Street Journal. He lives and works in Washington D.C.