Alexis de Tocqueville was one of the greatest political writers of all time. Born a French aristocrat, he saw the decimation of his family during the Reign of Terror. He spent most of his adult life struggling for liberty under the unsuccessful regimes of nineteenth-century France.
In 1831, Tocqueville made his famous voyage to America, and his two-volume record of his journey, Democracy in America,remains one of the most vital texts in the history of democratic thought. Deeply affected by his own experience of France’s disastrous revolutions, Tocqueville grappled incisively with the question of how America’s nascent democracy might thrive. His observations on American character and culture remain startlingly fresh nearly two centuries later.
A magisterial book by an eminent scholar of both European and American history, this will stand as the standard biography of Alexis de Tocqueville for years to come.
