The Tocqueville Review/La revue Tocqueville

The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville has just lost a close friend with the passing of Frank M. Turner, a distinguished intellectual historian and university librarian at Yale University. Frank was 66 years old.

Frank Turner’s most recent publications are a major new edition of Edmund Burke’s famous Reflections on the Revolution in France (Yale University Press, 2003), a book that Tocqueville argued against in the Ancien Régime, and an edition of John Henry Cardinal Newman’s Victorian autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Yale University Press, 2008). His magisterial John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (Yale University Press, 2002) is an indispensable study of the leader of the Tractarian movement in the Church of England who late in life became Cardinal Newman in the Catholic Church and is often credited as the father of the Second Vatican Council.

As director of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale since 2003, Frank Turner oversaw with special care the expansion and use of the rich collection of Tocqueville manuscripts, along with the papers of Tocqueville’s travel companion Gustave de Beaumont, which the Beinecke owns. He hosted at the Beinecke one of three symposia that the Tocqueville Society organized in 2005 for the Tocqueville bicentennial.

In our special bicentennial issue, Frank, who was especially attuned to the subtleties of the dialogue between Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill, published “Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill on Religion,” The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville, XXVII, 2 (2006): 149–72.

The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville feels the loss of an important intellectual partner and expresses its deepest condolences to Frank’s wife, Ellen Louise Tillotson.

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