Mentions personal use of Democracy in America.

Transcript context

…Why? — has always resonated with me much more than Mill, and more than Hayek too. I think that’s partly an Oxford story. As an undergraduate, we were required to read Tocqueville’s L’Ancien Régime in French in our first term. My French wasn’t that good, so it was quite hard work, but the conversations about that book that I remember having — not only with my tutor, Angus Macintyre, but with my near-contemporary, Andrew Sullivan — were very seminal. The realization that Tocqueville’s idea of liberty is something that has to be protected by nonobvious means, by things that you might not, as a liberal, even approve of — that’s a fascinating insight. Then, when we read Democracy in America, it became even clearer what Tocqueville’s project was, which was to show why France had failed to be or could not be the United States, and why American liberty had a very distinctive set of institutional supports. I think what I like about Tocqueville is that it’s a historical method that he uses. I’m a philosophical ignoramus. I can’t get past first base with abstract arguments. I need to be told a story, and Tocqueville’s story of what had gone wrong in 18th-century France, which makes a lot more sense when you read his account of what’s gone right in 19th-century America — that just clicked with me. I sometimes think of your implicit view of liberalism as a lot like that of Keynes. The history of Britain is the history of the British Empire. Keynes starts out working on India. It’s the quality of the British elite that matters most of all. When things go wrong, it’s a moral failure of that elite. He was not very directly philosophical, but he had plenty to say about history, political agreements, treaties, economic movements. Does that resonate with you? Or how do you feel when you read Keynes?…

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