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On a Saturday evening in June 1835, a year after he had finished the text of what was to be Part I of Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote a letter to John Stuart Mill asserting his own philosophical affinities: "I love liberty by taste, equality by instinct and reason." Peering through the "spectacles" of his time, he grasped what was to pull him in both directions at once. But his spectacles were very clear; so he saw (and described) how history could be both cruel and beneficent. Though Tocqueville wrote much about France in particular and Europe in general, it was the United States that was his most significant point of moral and historical reference.It has taken Bernard-Henri Levy some time to write systematically about America, though he has been immersed in our culture and politics--internally and in their effect on the world--for many years. Moreover, all that he has written is suffused with that wrenching Tocquevillean tug between liberty and equality--the very drama of America, which is still the arbiter, for better or for worse (I think for better), of the new century. Many years ago, I took a course with J.P. Mayer, perhaps the greatest Tocqueville scholar of all and, as editor of the Oeuvres completes, certainly the one who opened more windows onto the intellectual journey of that idiosyncratic French aristocrat who virtually founded political sociology. It is as an amateur but ardent Tocquevillean that I can report that anybody reading American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville who has also read Democracy in America, the Recollections, The Old Regime, and the correspondence will recognize the tropes and the concepts so deftly deployed by the learned Levy. So what in the world possessed The New York Times Book Review to ask Garrison Keillor to review Levy's book? It did put the review on the front page, signaling that Levy is someone with whom one must grapple. But Keillor cannot fathom the intellectual weight of Levy's transaction between Tocqueville and the present. He is out of his league. There is no philosophical argument in his hostile review, only a litany of ridicule. Keillor is an American mythographer, the nostalgic and reverse-snobbish creator of Lake Wobegon, his hugely successful line in middlebrow American sentimentality and a much greater assault on America's gray matter than Levy's reflective visits to Las Vegas and Dealey Plaza in Dallas. What does the inventor of "A Prairie Home Companion" know about the tradition in which Levy is working? Suppose Sartre had followed Tocqueville to the United States and written about his journey. To whom should the Times have assigned its review? To Thornton Wilder? Yes, that's it: the author of Our Town. There's the connection: Tocqueville was fixated on small- town America, and many of the classic community studies of the early decades of the last century were written about places called Middletown and Elmtown, Plainville and Hilltown, Yankeetown and Southern Town, false names for actual polities with a few thousand souls. So maybe Keillor was actually an inspired choice. Why shouldn't a bird review an ornithologist? Levy came on his journey to the America of today not with false memory, but with acute eyes. He did not see what Tocqueville saw because that no longer exists. But he carried Tocqueville's queries and insights with him, the infrastructure of his effort. The fact is that no one can ask the permanent questions about America without having digested Tocqueville's answers. On issue after issue, Levy deepens his understanding by filtering it through his predecessor's. On race, for example: Tocqueville saw that American blacks were submerged in "an abyss of evil." But he never saw a clear way out for them or for the country at large. Levy, too, is baffled by the predicament--anyone who is not is a fool. Lord Bryce, the author of The American Commonwealth, a great political text of the beginning of the last century, once observed, "Providence has under its special care children, idiots and the United States of America." Presumably, he was confounded by how little the United States looked like a singular nation, like a nation in Western Europe, at least until the colonized migrated across the borders and shores of the metropolitan powers, their revenge on imperialism itself. Levy also is still struck by the mad diversity of America. But it does not puzzle him. Despite the periodic eruptions of phobias against nonwhite immigrants, immigration reform has done nothing to discourage Mexicans, Filipinos, Koreans. He also understands that their Americanization has been eased by the growth in work available for the brain--alas, there is very little remunerative work available for brawn. Few names appear in Tocqueville, and those who do are of the likes of John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay. The sad truth is that our America, the America that Levy has visited so many times, is more defined by its celebrities than by its public thinkers. This is reflected in American Vertigo, and I don't like some of Levy's favorite celebrities, who are hardly notables or luminaries. Still, he argues with several intellectuals, fiercely and respectfully. The political philosopher Michael Walzer (one of my oldest friends and a tnr contributing editor) makes a grand appearance--though Levy did not actually meet him until after completing the book. He is a hero of sorts, and a man of the democratic left. Levy is a true friend of the American experiment and a comrade in the American struggle against the barbarisms (Islamofascism among them) that now assault decent people everywhere. No, he was not "for" the war in Iraq. But he is on the right side of every fundamental issue that faces the advanced societies, whether they deal with how we treat our own or how we treat others-- the victims of Darfur, for example. He really does act as his brother's keeper. Twenty-six years ago, I reviewed in these pages the book that brought Levy to our attention, Barbarism with a Human Face. I thought it a brave book, and a cogent one, and I still do. American Vertigo is a volume of a different sort, less intense and certainly less angry. But he has taken on a no less difficult subject: the character of American society. Levy's book about vertigo did not make me dizzy or giddy. It helped me to understand.

By martin peretz