<DIV><p><b>The End of the Democratic Age?</b> </p><div>When Alexis de Tocqueville wrote his seminal work <i>Democracy in America</i> (1835), he regarded democracy as the future of the West. Subsequent events, from the collapse of communism to the recent popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, seem to confirm his prescience. But a closer look at the history of democracy from the 1830s down to the present reveals a far more complicated picture. In fact, author Chilton Williamson Jr. concludes, the future appears rather unpromising for democratic institutions around the world.</div><div> </div><div><b><i>After Tocqueville</i></b> traces that history and examines that future. Williamson shows that in Europe democracy has tended toward socialism, in America toward nationalism. Indeed, the definitions and concepts of “democracy” have become so varied that the very term <i>democracy </i>is in effect meaningless—something upon which people have never been able to agree, and never will.</div><div> </div><div>Turning to the present, <b><i>After Tocqueville</i></b> chronicles how aspects of twenty-first-century life—political, economic, social, religious, intellectual, scientific and technical, environmental—militate against democracy in the long run, both in developing societies and in the supposedly democratic West. Williamson also considers the health and prospects of “democratic” movements around the world. His piercing assessment debunks the sunny notion (popularized by Francis Fukuyama twenty years ago) that democracy is steadily advancing almost everywhere, and that it will continue to do so.</div><div> </div><div>Clearly argued and elegantly written, <b><i>After Tocqueville</i></b> raises crucial questions about the future of democracy: How does a system whose institutions and habits arose in small-scale societies adapt to the postmodern, globalized world? How can democracy endure when people care for it less as the promise of liberty than as an engine for procuring what they want? And how does a political system survive when it is beset by problems that cannot be solved by political means?</div></DIV>