Synopses & Reviews
George W. Bush’s foreign policy touted America as the model of democracy worth exporting to the four corners of the globe. Osama bin Laden has painted a picture of our society as soulless and materialistic, representing values that are the antithesis of his version of Islam. Such starkly contrasting images of America fuel much heated debate today and drive conflicts around the world. But foreigners have long had a love/hate relationship with the United States, as this book reveals.
Contributors from comparative literature, history, philosophy, and political science combine their talents here to trace the changing visions of America that foreign travelers to our shores from England and France brought back to their contemporaries over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Novels and letters, political analysis, and philosophy are mined for perceptions of what America meant for these European visitors and how idealistic or realistic their observations were. Major writers such as Tocqueville play an important role in this dialogue, but so do lesser-known thinkers such as Gustave de Beaumont, Michel Chevalier, and Victor Jacquemont, whose importance this volume will help resurrect.
Synopsis
George W. Bush’s foreign policy touted America as the model of democracy worth exporting to the four corners of the globe. Osama bin Laden has painted a picture of our society as soulless and materialistic, representing values that are the antithesis of his version of Islam. Such starkly contrasting images of America fuel much heated debate today and drive conflicts around the world. But foreigners have long had a love/hate relationship with the United States, as this book reveals.
Contributors from comparative literature, history, philosophy, and political science combine their talents here to trace the changing visions of America that foreign travelers to our shores from England and France brought back to their contemporaries over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Novels and letters, political analysis, and philosophy are mined for perceptions of what America meant for these European visitors and how idealistic or realistic their observations were. Major writers such as Tocqueville play an important role in this dialogue, but so do lesser-known thinkers such as Gustave de Beaumont, Michel Chevalier, and Victor Jacquemont, whose importance this volume will help resurrect.
About the Author
Aurelian Craiutu is Associate Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of
Liberalism Under Siege: The Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires (2003) and editor/translator of
Tocqueville on America After 1840 (2009).
Jeffrey C. Isaac is James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. His books include Democracy in Dark Times (1998).
Table of Contents
ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Europeans in Search of America
Aurelian Craiutu and Jeffrey C. Isaac
Part One: America’s Many Faces
1. The Idea of America in the History of European Political Thought: 1492–9/11
Alan Levine
Part Two: America and the Enlightenment
2. Notes on Bishop Berkeley’s New World
Costica Bradatan
3. From Voltaire to Raynal and Diderot’s Histoire des deux Indes: The French Philosophes and Colonial America
Guillaume Ansart
4. On the Political Efficacy of Idealism: Tocqueville, Schoelcher, and the Abolition of Slavery
Nick Nesbitt
Part Three: French Views of America
5. A Precursor of Tocqueville: Victor Jacquemont’s Reflections on America
Aurelian Craiutu
6. Tyranny and Tragedy in Beaumont’s Marie
Christine Dunn Henderson
7. French Visions of America: From Tocqueville to the Civil War
Jeremy Jennings