Cloth $20.00 ISBN: 9780226087313 Published August 2013
E-book $18.00 About E-books ISBN: 9780226087450 Published August 2013

Tocqueville in Arabia

Dilemmas in a Democratic Age

Joshua Mitchell

Joshua Mitchell

208 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2013
Cloth $20.00 ISBN: 9780226087313 Published August 2013
E-book $18.00 About E-books ISBN: 9780226087450 Published August 2013
The Arab Spring, with its calls for sweeping political change, marked the most profound popular uprising in the Middle East for generations. But if the nascent democracies born of these protests are to succeed in the absence of a strong democratic tradition, their success will depend in part on an understanding of how Middle Easterners view themselves, their allegiances to family and religion, and their relationship with the wider world in which they are increasingly integrated.

Many of these same questions were raised by Alexis de Tocqueville during his 1831 tour of America, itself then a rising democracy. Joshua Mitchell spent years teaching Tocqueville’s classic account, Democracy in America, in America and the Arab Gulf and, with Tocqueville in Arabia, he offers a profound personal take. One of the reasons for the book’s widespread popularity in the region is that its commentary on the challenges of democracy and the seemingly contradictory concepts of equality and individuality continue to speak to current debates. While Mitchell’s American students tended to value the individualism of commercial self-interest, his Middle Eastern students had grave doubts about individualism and a deep suspicion for capitalism, which they saw as risking the destruction of long-held loyalties and obligations. When asked about suffering, American students answered in psychological or sociological terms, while Middle Eastern students understood it in terms of religion. Mitchell describes modern democratic man as becoming what Tocqueville predicted: a “distinct kind of humanity” that would be increasingly isolated and alone. Whatever their differences, students in both worlds were grappling with a sense of disconnectedness that social media does little to remedy.

We live in a time rife with mutual misunderstandings between America and the Middle East, and Tocqueville in Arabia offers a guide to the present, troubled times, leavened by the author’s hopes about the future.

Peter Berkowitz, Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Tocqueville in Arabia is a searching and eloquent meditation concerning the impact of the democratic spirit on students in a turbulent Middle East where the idea of equality has arrived recently and has been refracted through distinctive cultural, political, and religious lenses as well as on students in America, where the idea of equality has advanced far and wide. Joshua Mitchell weaves together keen observations of his students in Qatar and Iraq and at Georgetown University in Washington, subtle reflections on his lifetime of ties to the Arab word, and deft exposition of works of political philosophy, especially Tocqueville but with astute attention also given to Rousseau, Smith, and Marx. By throwing into sharp relief the expectations, aspirations, and anxieties that characterize young men and women today in regions of the world unequally touched by the spirit of equality, Mitchell illuminates the future of democracy and freedom."

George F. Will
“Tocqueville taught us how much can be learned about one culture seen through the lens of someone intelligent and sympathetic from another. Joshua Mitchell knows Tocqueville and Arabia, and his readers will come to know both better.”
Yossi Shain, Georgetown University
“In Tocqueville in Arabia, Joshua Mitchell explores the Middle East as a gifted scholar and a brilliant teacher. His book is an enticing and courageous reading of contemporary life among the younger generation in the Middle East, and a sober account of the challenges to modernity that lay ahead. This remarkable book, which draws on the philosophical writings of Tocqueville without being arcane or tendentious, illuminates what is going on in the hearts and minds of young people in the Middle East—and in America too. Tocqueville in Arabia is an outstanding example of how scholarship can shed light on the march of democracy and equality in our times.”

For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu
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