I opened Joshua Mitchell’s “Tocqueville in Arabia: The Anxieties of the Democratic Age” (original 2013 by UChicago Press, reprint in 2023 with Encounter Books) skeptical. The author spent 3 years in Qatar in the mid-2000s and runs the risk of pretending to a be country expert (as many fly-in fly-out scholars have done). Fortunately, I found this quite well done. There are parts that I found problematic, such as the societal generalizations the author draws based on a very small and non-representative sample of society he encountered in an elite, English speaking higher education institution (these social and political claims could have been validated or put into conversation with available data, which would have added a layer of depth). Most of the book draws on sociological insights of the US and Qatar drawing upon Tocqueville, which was interesting to read. The chapter on religion shifts; it presents more theology of Christianity and sociology of Islam which draws (often inaccurately) theological understandings of Islam. That said, this book reminded me of Ngugi wa Thiong’o when he argued that Kenyan students should read western literature, but should read it from the perspective or from the vantage point of Kenyan experiences. I felt that Joshua was reading Tocqueville in Arabia to better understand America, by reflecting on his engagements in Qatar (the book has much more content about American students and America than it does about Qatar and students there). I found this book at the Georgetown Qatar campus bookstore on a random stroll, and glad to have picked this up, and offers a good model for writing in the way that Ngugi advocated, globally engaged and locally relevant. A few notes:

“Almost all of my students on the main campus are haunted by the suffering of others and think that the sole purpose of social policy or political action is to eliminate it. When I tell them that Tocqueville thought that the sympathy they feel can only fully emerge in the democratic age, and that throughout history disregard for the suffering of others has been the rule rather than the exception, they are surprised. When their gaze fixes on a nation in which a family, class, tribe, or caste is in- ured to the suffering of others, they are apt to wonder how such an arrangement can be borne; yet it does not occur to them that there can be no sympathy without a notion of a common humanity in which each man participates, quite ir- respective of the predicates that attach to him. In the aristo- cratic age, where each family, class, tribe, or caste is a species of humanity unto itself, replete with its own internal codes of honor, the idea of a common humanity scarcely enters the mind; and so sympathy is largely absent.”  (p. 57)

“Why does money become so important in the democratic age? When loyalty and obligation are the real bonds that hold society together, as they are in the aristocratic age, work done or services performed do not always proceed with a view to payment. The “payment,” in fact, sometimes does not involve money at all, but rather the discharge of an obligation. Here, money is sometimes out of place; if offered or requested, it might even cause offense. In such a society, there are, so to speak, several economies: the larger and less palpable econ- omy whose currency is loyalty and obligation; and the smaller and more measurable economy whose currency is money. In the democratic age, obligation and loyalty diminish in importance. As roles are abandoned, loyalty and obligation become less and less thinkable. Each man increasingly thinks of himself as being alone, as an individual who hovers over the world but who is never quite bound to it. As this self- understanding grows, the vocabulary of individual choice and self-interest comes to predominate, and thoughts of money fill the imagination. Cut off from others and alone, without deliberate effort, democratic man can expect nothing of his neighbor, and his neighbor can expect nothing of him. The less palpable currency of loyalty and obligation almost dis- appears, and money becomes the chief means by which the business of society is undertaken.” (p. 60-61)

“”When all politics becomes national politics, when we less and less need to reach out to our neighbor, then political ideas need no longer be tempered or attenuated. No longer brought down to earth by the real-life compromises that neighbors must always make with one another, ideas become reified, positions harden, and, most importantly, each side begins to develop a caricatured image of the other that need never be modified. I do not doubt that the polarization between Left and Right in America today will increase as neighbor becomes more isolated from neighbor.” (p. 86)