What They Saw in America
Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, G. K. Chesterton, and Sayyid Qutb

Chronicling the visits of four important figures, this book will help Americans better understand themselves and how outsiders perceive them.

James L. Nolan, Jr (Author)

9781316601594, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 10 May 2016

306 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.43 kg

'Is America any longer a nation with good character? This fraught political question, striking at the heart of culture and identity, receives provocative yet judicious attention from James L. Nolan, Jr. in What They Saw in America, a new study of four of the most famous foreign critics of the United States … Nolan's searching analysis raises many pressing questions …' James Poulos, Law & Liberty Book Reviews (www.lawliberty.org)

Grounded in the stories of their actual visits, What They Saw in America takes the reader through the journeys of four distinguished, yet very different foreign visitors - Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, G. K. Chesterton and Sayyid Qutb - who traveled to the United States between 1830 and 1950. The comparative insights of these important outside observers (from both European and Middle Eastern countries) encourage sober reflection on a number of features of American culture that have persisted over time - individualism and conformism, the unique relationship between religion and capitalism, indifference toward nature, voluntarism, attitudes toward race, and imperialistic tendencies. Listening to these travelers' views, both the ambivalent and even the more unequivocal, can help Americans better understand themselves, more fully empathize with the values of other cultures, and more deeply comprehend how the United States is perceived from the outside.

1. Introduction
2. Pride, patriotism, and the mercantilist spirit: Tocqueville and Beaumont discover America
3. Tocqueville and the quandary of American democracy
4. Agrarianism, race, and the end of romanticism: Weber in early twentieth-century America
5. Weber on sects, schools, and the spirit of capitalism
6. A new Martin Chuzzlewit: Chesterton on main street
7. Chestertonian distributism and the democratic ideal
8. From Musha to New York: Qutb encounters American jahiliyya
9. Qutb's 'inquiring eyes' in Colorado and California
10. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Sociology [JHB], History of ideas [JFCX], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL]