Seymour Drescher: An Appreciation. Part II

In February 2024 Seymour Drescher, one of the most influential Tocqueville scholars of the past three generations, turned 90. To celebrate the occasion, The Tocqueville Review commissioned a two-part tribute to Professor Drescher’s remarkable scholarly career. Part I, which appeared in Vol. XLV, n° 2 (2024), traced Seymour Drescher’s intellectual biography from its beginnings at the City College of New York through the publication of his first book Tocqueville and England and the volume Tocqueville and Beaumont on Social Reform. Starting with the monograph Dilemmas of Democracy, Part II reviews Drescher’s field-defining contributions on Tocqueville and modernization, the history of abolitionism, the problem of revolution, and modern democracy’s enduring dilemmas.