Copyright 2006 by Tad Beckman, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA 91711
Background on Alexis de Tocqueville Tocqueville was born in 1805 into an aristocratic household. After an education in law, he began his career as a part-time judge. In 1828 he began an association with Gustave de Beaumont, the deputy public prosecutor at the court of Versailles. He and Beaumont became intellectual companions and, after Beaumont drafted a report on reform of the French penal system, both were offered the opportunity of traveling to America to study the system the American penal system first hand. Tocqueville and Beaumont left for America in April 1831 and returned to France in March 1832. Upon their return, they began work on and completed a report on the American penal system --- Du systeme penitentiaire aux Etats-Unis et de son application en France (1833). With this work past, Tocqueville began to reflect on his many experiences with American government and the American people themselves. The first volume of Democracy in America was published in 1835, and the second volume followed in 1840. The book received several excellent and enthusiastic reviews by John Stuart Mill. Meanwhile, Tocqueville was becoming absorbed deeply in French politics. He died in 1859.
You can find a chronology of his life here.
Tocqueville's Democracy in America Tocqueville's great work was divided into two volumes with two parts in Volume One and four parts in Volume Two. Sanford Kessler's abridgment gives us the entire table of contents so that you can see which portions have been left out. Volume One deals primarily with Tocqueville's observations regarding American government; Volume Two deals with the ways that democracy has apparently influenced American lives --- intellect, sentiments, moral habits, and political society.
While this is the least "philosophical" of the texts in this course, Tocqueville's observations of America only forty years or so after the founding of the government offer great insights into the Constitution's success as well as its failings. America was still largely homogeneous, founded on the immigration of English Puritans --- simple, hard working, and intelligent. In contrast to its aspirations for equality, however, it had a long history of slavery; it's relationships with native peoples were troubled; and it still withheld full citizenship rights from women. In the not distant future, it would begin a thorough-going harsh process of displacing native peoples out of the states and into the Western frontier, which it termed "Indian Country." In thirty more years, the Union collapsed into civil war. By the end of the Nineteenth Century, immigration from all over Europe had completely destroyed the Puritan English homogeneity. Women's right to vote had to wait until the 1920s and women's economic equality had to wait until late in the Twentieth Century. With the exception of some aggressive campaigns in North America, America remained essentially isolated even through the First World War. It was only the victorious effort of World War II and development of atomic weaponry that dropped America into the position of world economic and military dominance. One can only wonder what Tocqueville would have observed had he returned 170 years later.
Updated on February 25, 2006; click here to return to My HomePage or here to return to Course Index Page.