Peter Foley/European Pressphoto AgencyBernard-Henri Lévy at the New York Public Library on Wednesday. "This entire book was written in the grip of a kind of religious terror," Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his introduction to "Democracy in America." It is difficult to believe. Religious terror? Tocqueville, an aristocratic French lawyer, wrote his classic text after a nine-month visit to the United States in 1831. And far from being saturated with terror, it is a refined, detached series of reflections on the effects of American democracy on character, commerce, culture and belief: why the arts in America are more concerned...
