a short, thin, and frail body. Beneath locks of brown hair, his delicate, aristocratic face was dominated by large, intelligent brown eyes. He and Beaumont embarked for New York in April, 1831.

Returning to France in 1832, Tocqueville and Beaumont finished their study of the American penal system. It was published in 1833 as Du système pénitentiaire aux États-Unis et de son application en France (On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France, 1833). This official obligation resolved, Tocqueville left his judicial post, moved into a modest Paris apartment, and began what he later described as the happiest two years of his life, writing his two-volume De la démocratie en Amérique (1835, 1840; Democracy in America, 1835, 1840). This work was proclaimed the classic treatment of its subject throughout the Western world and assured Tocqueville’s fame as a political observer and political philosopher, and, later, as a sociologist.

While writing the third volume of Democracy in America, Tocqueville in 1837 sought election as a deputy from his native constituency, La Manche. Failing in 1837, he succeeded in 1839, serving in the Chamber of Deputies continuously until 1851 and almost always in opposition to the government of Louis-Philippe. From 1842 to 1848, practicing his belief that a healthy state was founded upon vigorous local government, he served on the local general council. Although he never perceived himself as a political leader, he nevertheless reinforced his convictions by public service.

Meanwhile, he was among the few who prophesied the coming of the Revolution of 1848, which ended the Second Republic, replacing it with the plebiscite government of Louis Napoleon, who was soon to proclaim the Second Empire and his rule as Napoleon III. Though he had voted against Napoleon, Tocqueville was reelected to a new national assembly and on June 2, 1849, was appointed France’s foreign minister. Once again, his acceptance of the post was intended to keep the republican spirit alive, certain as he was that Napoleon intended to bury it. Over the next few months as foreign minister—he resigned on October 31, 1849—he dealt with the Austrian-Piedmontese conflict, the Turkish question, problems with the Roman Catholic church, and Swiss rights of asylum, each an important problem at the time.

Exhausted when he left office, he served on yet another parliamentary commission studying the question of Napoleon’s reeligibility as president—an issue resolved dramatically by the president’s own coup d’ état of December 2, 1851. It was amid such events, the latter of which shocked Tocqueville as well as most of Europe’s informed opinion, that he began writing Souvenirs de Alexis de Tocqueville (1893; The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville, 1896, 1949) in June, 1850. Although many scholars regard it as his greatest book, a classic historical, sociological, and political analysis of the antecedents, personalities, and events of the Revolution of 1848 in France, Tocqueville had not intended it for publication.

With the completion of The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville, Tocqueville was already embarked on his L’Ancien Régime et la révolution (1856; The Old Régime and the Revolution, 1856), in which, after five years of exhaustive archival research, he demonstrated that the centralization of power in France was not a consequence of the Revolution of 1789 but rather had been proceeding for centuries. This extension of power, pursued by an alienated and obsolete aristocracy and running counter to gains in popular power and popular enthusiasm for equality and freedom, helped make revolution inevitable. This was Tocqueville’s last work. Lying ill for several weeks at his family estate at Cannes, he confessed, regretted that he had not been a more ardent disciple of Catholicism, and died on April 16, 1859.

Summary

Alexis de Tocqueville’s principal moral and intellectual concern was with freedom. He was not a liberal, however, any more than he was a democrat. Liberalism skirted on unbridled individualism, democracy on an egalitarian reductionism, a tendency to put everyone on an equal, but low level. Rather, in Tocqueville’s view, all freedom begins with recognition that man is the creature of a larger collectivity, a creature of God. Lacking this appreciation, no one can really call himself free. From that basic premise—and it suffuses all of Tocqueville’s major works—he strove through his extraordinary powers of observation and research to develop a political philosophy that struck a balance between men’s rights and their duties. While capable of dealing in abstractions in these matters, he nevertheless felt comfortable only when fitting them into historical and substantive cultural contexts, whether his immediate interests were structural, that is, sociological, or lay in the measurement and movement of power, that is, political.

Being neither a liberal nor a democrat but a French aristocrat who recognized that the authority of aristocracies in France and Great Britain had been shattered—and in the United States, he believed, had never existed—lent Tocqueville’s work its much-admired objectivity. His major studies were offered primarily for the consideration of Frenchmen. While democratization had proceeded much further in the United States, France, he believed, also confronted the same conditions. While manifested dramatically in political upheavals and revolutions, both historical tendencies (toward popular power and toward centralized power), he believed, were centuries in the making. The question for his day was, Would the age-old centralizing process that he discerned, when joined with the inevitable centralizing power of majoritarian and egalitarian democracy, lead to tyranny—though a tyranny of, or in the name of, the masses? Tocqueville sensed what the twentieth century has proved—most authoritarian states have justified themselves as being democratic, as governing in the name of the people. Democrats, it seemed on his evidence, were assuming the political and administrative roles of aristocracies. In the face of the egalitarian surge, however, the centralization of power was broadening, not declining, hence the interference of the state increasingly menaced the integrity of the individual’s freedom.

Thirteen years older than Karl Marx, Tocqueville wrote of the importance of classes in history, while utterly rejecting what later became Marx’s determinism respecting their roles. Unearthing the interrelations among a people’s perceived and historical experiences, their manners and mores, and the configuration of their political institutions, his works place him among the other great men who analyzed the nature of society, beginning with Aristotle and proceeding through modern times.

Bibliography

Herr, Richard. Tocqueville and the Old Regime. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962. The author, a specialist in modern French history, deals with the incompleteness and apparent inconsistencies of Tocqueville’s The Old Régime and the Revolution. An informative and well-written work with a selective bibliography and a useful index.

Laski, Harold J. “Alexis de Tocqueville and Democracy.” In The Social and Political Ideas of Some Representative Thinkers of the Victorian Age, edited by F. J. C. Hearnshaw. London: G. G. Harrap, 1933. Laski, a distinguished British liberal-left political analyst and a force behind the extension of the British welfare state, cogently examines Tocqueville’s views on social democracy and their relevance to modern democracies. No notes, bibliography, or index. Generally available.

Mayer, Jacob Peter. Alexis de Tocqueville: A Biographical Study in Political Science. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960. Mayer is one of the foremost authorities on Tocqueville, having researched, translated, revised, and completed many of Tocqueville’s works. This is a delightfully informative and clearly written overview intended for general readers. There is one portrait, an appendix assessing Tocqueville’s influences after a century, endnotes, a useful bibliography, and a reliable index. Generally available.

Mayer, Jacob Peter, and A. P. Kerr. Introduction to Recollections, by Alexis de Tocqueville. Translated by George Lawrence. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970. This is the best edition of what many regard as Tocqueville’s finest work. Mayer and Kerr, experts on Tocqueville, provide an informative introductory essay, many footnotes, a select bibliography, and an extensive index. Available in good bookstores as well as major college and university libraries.

Pierson, George W. Tocqueville and Beaumont in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1938. This remains the definitive study of Tocqueville’s months in the United States. A thorough evaluation of the settings through which these two friends passed, of the people they met, and of the sources that they employed for their study of the American penal system and, in Tocqueville’s case, for his great study of democracy. Traces Tocqueville’s intellectual development with an eye to clarifying all of his writings. Clearly written and understandable by general readers. There are footnotes, a good bibliography, and a valuable index.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. Edited by Phillips Bradley. 2 vols. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945. This is a revised version of the first English translation and includes informative notes, historical essays, useful bibliographies, and extensive indexes in each volume. The author claims that Tocqueville’s work remains one of the most magisterial analyses ever produced on the principle of the sovereignty of the people, its cultural roots, and its evolving political effects.

Zetterbaum, Marvin. Tocqueville and the Problem of Democracy. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1967. An examination of Tocqueville’s proposition that democracy was inevitable and therefore that democracy had to be made safe for the world. The author’s view is that the “inevitability thesis” distracted readers from Tocqueville’s central concern about perfecting democracy and of harmonizing the demands of justice with those of excellence. However brief, this is an enlightening study, clearly written and intended for the general reader. There are footnotes throughout, a useful bibliography, and a valuable index.