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Democracy Tamed
French Liberalism and the Politics of Suffrage (Oxford University Press, 2024) Winner of the 2025 Catherine & Michael Zuckert Award, Association for the History of Political Thought (AHPT) Liberal democracies are under constant threat in the twenty-first century, and there is growing skepticism about whether liberalism and democracy can continue to survive together. In Democracy Tamed, Gianna Englert argues that the dilemmas facing liberal democracy are not unique to our present moment, but have existed since the birth of liberal political thought in nineteenth-century France. Combining political theory and intellectual history, Democracy Tamed tells the story of how the earliest liberals deployed their “new democracy” to combat universal suffrage. But it also reveals how later liberals would appropriate their predecessors’ antidemocratic arguments to safeguard liberal democracies as we have come to know them. |
Book Symposium:
History of European Ideas, Contributors: Danielle Charette James, Greg Conti, Dimitrios Halikias, with introduction by Emre Gerçek & response by Gianna Englert
Reviews:
"Englert shows that there was a battle fought for the place and meaning of democracy as liberalism emerged in the nineteenth century...[and] makes a major contribution to the recent historical turn in liberalism scholarship...In careful and revealing readings of Benjamin Constant, François Guizot, Alexis de Tocqueville, Édouard Laboulaye, and Ernest Duvergier, Englert unfolds a story of what she calls 'democracy's 'eternal antinomy' between the rights of the many and the wisdom of the few, between the universality of political rights and the limits that nature has presumably placed upon the capacity to bear them'...Englert's attention to these figures in the history of liberalism constructs a kind of materialist history of what liberals actually thought and directs helpful study to the policies and procedures they supported." – Modern Intellectual History
"Gianna Englert's original and well-researched book invites her readers to reflect on the complex history of liberalism and the challenges to political democracy. She examines the language of political capacity in the writings of nineteenth-century political thinkers such as Guizot, Constant, Tocqueville, Laboulaye, and Duvergier de Hauranne, who teach us important lessons about the complex relationship between liberalism and democracy. An essential book for political theorists, historians of political thought, and intellectual historians."
– Aurelian Craiutu, Indiana University, Bloomington
"The marriage of liberalism and democracy is in trouble, weakened by ideological infidelities on both sides. In a series of original and keenly observed studies focusing on key nineteenth-century French thinkers, Gianna Englert reveals how the emergence of a distinctive egalitarianism among liberals made the fusion of liberal and democratic commitments more than simply a marriage of convenience. Her impressive narrative breathes new life into forgotten debates over suffrage and electoral laws to illuminate both enduring tensions and elective affinities between majoritarian democracy and liberal values."
– Cheryl B. Welch, Harvard University
History of European Ideas, Contributors: Danielle Charette James, Greg Conti, Dimitrios Halikias, with introduction by Emre Gerçek & response by Gianna Englert
Reviews:
"Englert shows that there was a battle fought for the place and meaning of democracy as liberalism emerged in the nineteenth century...[and] makes a major contribution to the recent historical turn in liberalism scholarship...In careful and revealing readings of Benjamin Constant, François Guizot, Alexis de Tocqueville, Édouard Laboulaye, and Ernest Duvergier, Englert unfolds a story of what she calls 'democracy's 'eternal antinomy' between the rights of the many and the wisdom of the few, between the universality of political rights and the limits that nature has presumably placed upon the capacity to bear them'...Englert's attention to these figures in the history of liberalism constructs a kind of materialist history of what liberals actually thought and directs helpful study to the policies and procedures they supported." – Modern Intellectual History
"Gianna Englert's original and well-researched book invites her readers to reflect on the complex history of liberalism and the challenges to political democracy. She examines the language of political capacity in the writings of nineteenth-century political thinkers such as Guizot, Constant, Tocqueville, Laboulaye, and Duvergier de Hauranne, who teach us important lessons about the complex relationship between liberalism and democracy. An essential book for political theorists, historians of political thought, and intellectual historians."
– Aurelian Craiutu, Indiana University, Bloomington
"The marriage of liberalism and democracy is in trouble, weakened by ideological infidelities on both sides. In a series of original and keenly observed studies focusing on key nineteenth-century French thinkers, Gianna Englert reveals how the emergence of a distinctive egalitarianism among liberals made the fusion of liberal and democratic commitments more than simply a marriage of convenience. Her impressive narrative breathes new life into forgotten debates over suffrage and electoral laws to illuminate both enduring tensions and elective affinities between majoritarian democracy and liberal values."
– Cheryl B. Welch, Harvard University
