***

Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass by Theodore Dalrymple.

Citymaking: Building Community Without Building Walls by Gerald E. Frug.

Dalrymple, a British prison doctor writing pseudonymously, has collected his essays from the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal into a powerful book on how intellectuals helped produce the British “underclass”—that largely white though increasingly immigrant group—violent, vulgar, and virtually doomed to failure. “In fact most of the social pathology exhibited by the underclass has its origin in ideas that have filtered down from the intelligentsia,” Dalrymple writes. These ideas include sexual liberation, feminism, dumbed-down public education, the loosening of moral responsibility via the all-purpose excuses of poverty and racism—in other words, the whole plate of postmodern nihilism.

A rich example of Dalrymple’s contention that bizarre theory has influenced practice is Harvard law professor Gerald Frug’s Citymaking. After two insightful chapters on the powerlessness of cities in American political thought, the book takes on a postmodern dimension. The late David Broyles once argued that the postmodern Left is the true heir of the Anti-Federalists. This book vindicates this apercu, as we see Frug’s attempt to transcend the “situated subject” and construct “ageographical cities” via “community building.”

Implicit in all this is the end of the “bourgeois” concept of rights and the transformation of citizens into powerless products of society. Inevitably, law professors would be in charge. All this reconstruction is necessitated by the problems of the 11 million blacks living in “urban ghettos—less than 5 percent of the country’s urbanized population.” To justify his astounding leaps, Frug observes, “Romantic images have considerable practical effect.” We see such effects on display in Dalrymple’s “underclass.”

—Ken Masugi

***

Writings on Empire and Slavery by Alexis de Tocqueville, edited and translated by Jennifer Pitts.

De Tocqueville by Cheryl B. Welch.

Welch’s volume in the Founders of Modern Political and Social Thought series from Oxford University Press is no elementary introduction to one of the most fascinating students of the modern world. Welch maintains that Tocqueville’s “new science of politics” contradicted the powerful post-revolutionary call for social science, which arose precisely in order to explain the French Revolution and its consequences. The irony of her approach is that it focuses our attention on his style, his rhetoric, but not the core of his political philosophy.

Those political concerns become clear in Tocqueville’s Writings on Empire and Slavery, which contains his reports on Algeria, notes on the Koran, and an essay urging the emancipation of slaves. Here we see the author of Democracy in America outlining a sort of Barbarism in Islam—and how to civilize it. Jennifer Pitts, the translator of these writings, condemns Tocqueville’s defense of French imperialism. But Tocqueville sees civilizing trends in Algeria: “the whole younger generation of Arabs speaks our language, and they have already partly adopted our mores.” Noting that Arabs and French serve together in the military, he concludes: “There is, then, no reason to believe that time will not succeed in amalgamating the two races. God is not stopping it; only human deficiencies can stand in its way.” But of course political men realize that there is no end to “human deficiencies”—hence the ongoing need for force. Tocqueville may well have underestimated the political nature of man, but not to the extent that these two scholars imply.

—Ken Masugi