Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) was a French aristocrat, political thinker, historian, and statesman best known for Democracy in America. After traveling in the United States in the 1830s, he produced one of the most influential analyses of democratic society ever written. His other major work, The Old Regime and the Revolution, examined the continuity between pre-revolutionary France and the revolutionary order that followed. Alexis de Tocqueville matters because he saw both the promise and danger of democracy: equality, civic energy, local association, individualism, majority pressure, restlessness, and centralization. He wrote as a liberal concerned with liberty under modern social conditions. His quotes often address enemies, history, defects, and the mixed nature of political achievement. They endure because they make democracy feel like a moral and social condition, not merely a voting system.

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