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Is it coincidental that the best book ever written on America was not written by an American?
I don't know. It is something of reproach to us Americans that the best book should have been written by a Frenchman. Of course, he has the advantage of being an outside observer. But it doesn't help you that much to be an outside observer if you are not also a very acute observer, which Tocqueville was. I don't think it has to be the case that a foreigner is a better observer than a native. After all, a lot of other Frenchmen who came to America in the nineteenth century were somewhat contemptuous of this half-civilized republic in the wilderness, attempting to be European and not succeeding. That was how they typically understood it. Tocqueville had a very different view. He looked on America as the future of democracy, which was also the future of Europe. So he thought America was ahead of Europe rather than behind. That I think is what distinguishes Tocqueville from other French or European observers who came here.
Why was there a need for this new translation of yours?
There are two other translations. One was done by an Englishman, Henry Reeve, during Tocqueville's lifetime. Tocqueville read this translation, and he didn't altogether like it. He said that his friend Henry Reeve had accentuated whatever he said in favor of aristocracy and played down whatever he said in favor of democracy. That is a rather severe criticism of a translation. Nonetheless, that one lasted for a long time because it was done by a friend of his. More recently, in the 1960s, there was a new translation by a man named George Lawrence under the editorship of J. P. Mayer, a longtime scholar of Tocqueville. That translation is a lot better than the Reeve one, but it is not nearly good enough. My wife, Delba Winthrop, and I wanted to make a much more accurate rendition of Tocqueville than either of those two. We wanted to try to maintain consistency in translating his key terms and keep something of the flavor of his French.
There are two ideas of how to translate. One is to bring the work being translated to our time, and the other is to invite readers in our time go back to the work being translated. We definitely attempted to do the latter. We don't mind using old-fashioned expressions, as long as they are understandable today. We wanted very much to maintain a certain fidelity to Tocqueville, who was a much greater writer and thinker than we are. Of course, whenever you translate, you are in the realm of imperfection because two languages never match exactly. His time is different from ours. Given the inevitable defects of translation, we tried to be as faithful as we could.
What drew you and your wife to this project?
What drew me to it was, first, my wife's great acquaintance with the book. She knows it backwards and forwards. It seemed to me that that was something we should take advantage of. Second, I have translated Machiavelli, and I rather like translating. It is a relaxation from writing one's own thoughts. It gives you very close acquaintance with the great books, if that is what you are translating. So, I was looking for something to translate. And since we teach Democracy in America all the time, we knew that the existing translations were very inadequate.
Were there instances when Tocqueville was just dead wrong?
I can't think of any. "Dead wrong" is a strong term. He feared a race war. That did not happen, very fortunately. He thought it was equally dangerous not to free the slaves and to free them. He didn't anticipate that the war which came would be between two groups of whites. I guess you can say that he also didn't anticipate that there would be an Abraham Lincoln, a man of such towering intelligence and morality and of such effective statesmanship, through whose leadership the matter of slavery could be set on a course that has brought us much closer to racial harmony than Tocqueville ever expected.
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