John Prideaux

speaker

643 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 19 Jun

John Prideaux’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

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The Intelligence from The Economist · Tocqueville Road Trip: 1. Game of chance · 13 Jun 2026 podcast

Agnes Hugh Tang is an art historian, and as she was reading Tocville, she was struck by a scene that felt oddly familiar.

I left the soiree at Lincoln Center feeling reassured that I was onto something, but also with a lot to think about.

Because and there's no way of getting around this, Democracy in America is a dauntingly large book.

My edition runs to over seven hundred pages.

The index alone takes up twelve of them and runs from abolition and Adams, John Quincy, through to workers, writers, and Zeisberger, David.

He was a missionary who spent time among Native American tribes, since you asked.

Tocqueville combined a journalist's knack for gathering stories in the field with a philosopher's love of analysis, structure, and theory.

Like all great French intellectuals, he was constantly on the hunt for the deeper meaning behind things.

This makes him easy to poke fun at.

One chapter in Democracy in America, for instance, is titled How the Excessive Love of Well-Being Can Be Harmful to Well-Being.

Another is headed, Why the Americans have never been as passionate as the French for general ideas in political matters.

Or, perhaps my favorite, on the gravity of Americans, and why it does not prevent their often doing ill-considered things.

But actually, Togville's restless desire to find meaning and to divide his thinking up into short, clearly chaptered essays, is a feature, not a bug.

Because Democracy in America is not a book that you read cover to cover.

It's one you browse through and graze on, slowly filling up on the fruits of his thinking.

I've been doing this for years.

I'll take down my copy from the shelf, scan through the index for the topic I'm working on, presidential election, say, or the Supreme Court, or the South, or any one of a hundred other things, and see what Tockville thought.

And now, as I approach the end of my time as US editor, I'm going to explore five key areas in which I think this brilliant Frenchman has something important to say about America.

One in each episode.

Contrasting his ideas then with what I find now.

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