Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom by Kathryn Olivarius (review)

Abstract

tocratic.” None of these conclusions are accurate, but de Tocqueville was wedded to them despite his empirical observations to the contrary. In his political career, he demonstrated the same naiveté concerning the practice of politics. An excellent theorist, one would surmise, would be able to apply those ideas to the building of political co ali tions around much needed reforms. Unfortunately, just as his Democracy in Amer i ca and theoretical work missed the dirty work of politics in the details, so de Tocqueville was unable to work the room in France’s national legislature or make much of an impact on the Second Republic’s constitution or in his brief stint as foreign minister. Despite his legal training and early work in the courts, de Tocqueville also seems to have not fully appreciated the English legal inheritance for Amer i ca’s national experiment, nor the defects in the federal system. He was committed to his dying day to the need to avoid centralization in order to preserve local traditions. With French democracy having succumbed to Bonapartism for the second time, the U.S. on the verge of civil conflict, and 1848 a lost cause, he might well have wondered whether he had made any contribution at all. He should not have worried about that. Though Zunz could have done more to show de Tocqueville’s lasting legacy in the social sciences, political theory, as a key primary source on Jacksonian democracy, and as an analyst of the origins of the French Revolution, this biography stands as a testament to a remarkable thinker and observer of a critical period in both French and American history.