America Through European Eyes

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Europeans in Search of America

Aurelian Craiutu and Jeffrey C. Isaac

Part One: America’s Many Faces

1. The Idea of America in the History of European Political Thought: 1492–9/11

Alan Levine

Part Two: America and the Enlightenment

2. Notes on Bishop Berkeley’s New World

Costica Bradatan

3. From Voltaire to Raynal and Diderot’s Histoire des deux Indes: The French Philosophes and Colonial America

Guillaume Ansart

4. On the Political Efficacy of Idealism: Tocqueville, Schoelcher, and the Abolition of Slavery

Nick Nesbitt

Part Three: French Views of America

5. A Precursor of Tocqueville: Victor Jacquemont’s Reflections on America

Aurelian Craiutu

6. Tyranny and Tragedy in Beaumont’s Marie

Christine Dunn Henderson

7. French Visions of America: From Tocqueville to the Civil War

Jeremy Jennings

“In America Through European Eyes, Aurelian Craiutu and Jeffrey Isaac have assembled a stellar group of thinkers from across the political spectrum to examine the question: what does America mean to Europe? . . . The authors explain in careful detail some of the most essential and neglected works of the nineteenth century. That this collection is valuable goes without saying. That it is worth reading is incontestable.”

—Cary Federman, Nineteenth-Century French Studies