Festival Albertine Preview, Oct. 18: Why Do We Still Read Tocqueville?

Françoise Mélonio is Professor at the University of Paris Sorbonne and Dean of Studies at Sciences Po. She focuses her research on European cultural and intellectual history and especially the relations between history and literature. She is responsible for the 30-volume Gallimard edition of Tocqueville’s OEuvres complètes, and, with François Furet, the two-volume University of Chicago edition of The Old Regime and the Revolution. Her books include Tocqueville and the French (University of Virginia Press, 1998), an ambitiously expansive study of Tocqueville’s influence in Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Arthur Goldhammer has translated more than 120 books from the French, including a new translation of Democracy in America for the Library of America (2004), Thomas Piketty’sCapital in the 21st Century (2014), and François Furet and Mona Ozouf’s Critical
Dictionary of the French Revolution. As a student of the Enlightenment he is an affiliate of the Center for European Studies at Harvard, and writes the cant-defying blog French Politics.

Paul Berman is a senior editor of the New Republic and writes about literature and politics. His essay “The Poetry of Democracy” is collected in the anthology Tocqueville and the Frontiers of Democracy (2013). His books include A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (1996), the startling Power and the Idealists: Or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath (2005), and Terror and Liberalism (2003) and The Flight of the Intellectuals (2010), unflinching unravelings of Islamist ideology and left-wing apologies for terrorism.

John Rockwell served as the New York Times European cultural correspondent, classical music critic and reporter, chief rock critic, arts columnist, and dance critic, and as editor of the Sunday Arts & Leisure section. He founded the Lincoln Center Festival and was its director for its first four years. He is the author of All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century (1983), Sinatra: An American Classic(1984), The Idiots, on the Lars von Trier film (2003), and Outsider: John Rockwell on the Arts (2006), and the editor of The Times of the Sixties (2014).