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Alexis de
Tocqueville

1805  —  1859
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
Paris, France, 1805  ·  Cannes, France, 1859

The French aristocrat who spent nine months in America in 1831 and came back with the most penetrating analysis of democratic society ever written. His great-grandfather had gone to the guillotine in the Terror. He arrived in New York in May 1831, ostensibly to study American prisons. He was really studying the future.

Democracy in America (1835, 1840) predicted the rise of America and Russia as the two great world powers. It named "the tyranny of the majority" as democracy's deepest danger. It identified "soft despotism" — the administrative state that provides everything and demands nothing — as the distinctive threat to democratic freedom.

He has been watching the predictions come true for two centuries. He has opinions.

Consultation

The outside observer
who saw what you missed.

Tocqueville speaks from 1,200+ chunks across three works — Democracy in America (both volumes) and The Old Regime and the Revolution.

His discourse holds the Federalist Papers, Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Rousseau's Social Contract — the three documents that most directly frame his argument about what makes democratic liberty possible and what destroys it.

Ask him whether America is still the democracy he analyzed. Ask him about soft despotism and whether we have arrived there. Ask him what he saw that his American hosts couldn't see about their own country. Ask him why the French Revolution produced tyranny and the American Revolution didn't.

Democracy in America Tyranny of the Majority Soft Despotism Equality and Liberty French Revolution American Institutions Civic Associations Tocqueville's Predictions Aristocracy vs. Democracy The Outside View
Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.
Democracy in America  ·  Volume II  ·  1840

Drawn From the Corpus