is professor of Political Philosophy at Boston College, Massachusetts, and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Each fall he teaches courses in the Department of Political Science at Boston College. He was previously assistant to Raymond Aron at the College de France. He was one of the founders of the quarterly Commentaire, and remains a regular contributor. In his research on the origins of modern political philosophy, he has made important contributions to the revaluation of the great liberal French philosophers, such as Benjamin Constant, François Guizot and, above all, Alexis de Tocqueville. He has published numerous books and articles, many of them translated into English: An Intellectual History of Liberalism (1996), Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy (1996), The City of Man (1998) and Modern Liberty and its Discontents (1998). He recently published the essays La Raison des nations (2006), Ce que peut la littérature (2006, with Alain Finkielkraut and Mona Ozouf) and Enquête sur la démocratie (2007).