Alexis de Tocqueville
The French sociologist and political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) traveled to the United States in 1831 to see its prisons and returned with a large number of more extensive observations that he codified in “Democracy in America” (1835), probably the most important publications of the 19th century. With its scathing remarks on individualism and equality, Tocqueville’s work remains an invaluable reason for America for Europeans and for Americans for themselves.
Alexis de Tocqueville was born in 1805 into an aristocratic family, not long ago shaken by the revolutionary upheavals in France. Both of his parents had been imprisoned during the Reign of Terror. After attending college at Metz, Tocqueville learned law in Paris and was appointed a magistrate at Versailles, exactly where he met his future wife and befriended a fellow lawyer named Gustave de Beaumont.
In 1830 Louis Philippe, the “bourgeois monarch,” obtained the French throne, and Tocqueville’s career aspirations were temporarily blocked. Unable to advance, he and Beaumont obtained permission to conduct an investigation of the American penal system, and in April 1831 they set sail for Rhode Island.
From Sing Sing Prison to the forests of Michigan, from New Orleans to the White House, Beaumont and Tocqueville traveled for 9 months by steamboat, stagecoach, horseback and canoe, traveling to America’s prisons and much more. In Pennsylvania, Tocqueville spent a week selecting every inmate at the Eastern State Penitentiary. In Washington, DC, he visited President Andrew Jackson during visiting hours and exchanged courtesies.
The travelers returned to France in 1832. They quickly published their report, “On the prison system in the United States and its application in France,” written mainly by Beaumont. Tocqueville set out to focus on a broader assessment of American society and politics, published in 1835 as “Democracy in America.”
As “Democracy in America” revealed, Tocqueville believed that equality was the wonderful political and social thought of his era, and he believed that America provided the most complex example of equality on the move. American individualism was admired by him, but he cautioned that a society of people can easily become atomized and paradoxically consistent when “each citizen, simply being digested by the rest, is actually lost in the crowd.” He felt that a society of people lacked the intermediate community structures, such as those provided by standard hierarchies, to mediate associations with the express. The effect could be a democratic “majority tyranny” in which specific rights had been compromised.
Tocqueville was impressed by much of what he noticed in the American way of life, admiring the balance of its economy and wondering about the acceptance of its churches. Furthermore, he noted the irony of the mistreatment of Native Americans by the freedom-loving nation and their acceptance of slavery.
In 1839, as the publication of the next volume of “Democracy in America” approached, Tocqueville re-entered political life, serving as a deputy in the French assembly. After the European revolutions of 1848, he briefly served as Louis Napoleon’s foreign minister before being ousted from politics once again when he refused to aid Louis Napoleon’s coup.
He retired to his family estate in Normandy and began to create a history of contemporary France, the first volume of which was printed as “The Old Regime and the French Revolution” (1856). He blamed the French Revolution on the crisis of the nobility, as well as the political disillusionment of the French public. Tocqueville’s plans for later volumes had been cut short by the death of his from tuberculosis in 1859.