In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville and his friend Gustave de Beaumont
visited the United States on behalf of the French government to
study American prisons. In their nine months in the U.S. they
studied not just the prison system but every aspect of American
life, public and private--the political, economic, religious,
cultural, and above all social life of the young nation. From
Tocqueville's copious notes of what he had seen and heard came the
classic text "De la Democratie en Amerique," published in two large
volumes, the first in 1835, the second in 1840. The first volume
focused primarily on political society; the second, on civil
society. Tocqueville's account of the travels and adventures of the
two Frenchmen aimed to get down the truth about America, not only
to praise the new country's strengths but also to critique its
shortcomings when these were all too evident to outside eyes.
For Tocqueville, virtually every aspect of the new republic was
fascinating: the laws and the customs, the manners and the mores of
a people so very different from the populations of the kingdoms of
Europe. He was particularly interested in the success of democracy
in America, specifically of republican representative democracy,
which seemed to have failed elsewhere, most conspicuously in
revolutionary France. Perhaps because Tocqueville, an aristocrat,
was by no means sympathetic to "pure" democracy, which seemed
tainted by its associations with the Terror of the French
Revolution, he examined American democracy with a thoroughness such
as had never been seen before, and seldom if ever since.
Tocqueville considered the tendency of democracy to degenerate into
either the tyranny of the majority or what he called soft
despotism, a sovereign power that "extends its arms over the entire
society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small,
complicated, minute, and uniform rules. . . .it does not tyrannize,
it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it
stupifies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more
than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the
government is the shepherd." (Book IV, chapter 6.)
Tocqueville noted that religion played a leading role in American
life in the 1830s, due to its being constitutionally separated from
government. Far from objecting to this situation, he observed that
Americans found this disestablishment quite satisfactory, in
contrast to France, with its outright antagonism between avowedly
religious people and supporters of democracy.
The Liberty Fund bilingual "Democracy in America "includes Eduardo
Nolla's historical-critical edition of the French text and notes on
the lefthand pages and James Schleifer's English translation on the
right. This is the fullest historical-critical edition of the
"Democracy," and the notes offer an extensive selection of early
outlines, drafts, manuscript variants, marginalia, unpublished
fragments, and other materials. From the foreword to the French
edition: "This new "Democracy" is not only the one that Tocqueville
presented to the reader of 1835, then to the reader of 1840. It is
enlarged, amplified by a body of texts. . . . the reader will see
how Tocqueville proceeded with the elaboration of the main ideas of
his book."
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) was a French writer and
politician. With his friend Gustave Beaumont he spent nine months
in America and with him published a study of the American penal
system and its applicability to France. Tocqueville's fame was
established by his "De la Democratie en Amerique," published in two
volumes in 1835 and 1840. He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies
in 1839, was a member of the Constituent Assembly in 1848 and of
the Legislative Assembly in 1849, was minister of foreign affairs
in 1849, and was imprisoned in 1851 for his opposition to the coup
d'etat of Louis-Napoleon. At his
General
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