Democracy in America: Book One

Alexis de Tocqueville

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Mar 20, 2017 - History - 470 pages

De La Démocratie en Amérique (published in two volumes, the first in 1835 and the second in 1840) is a classic French text by Alexis de Tocqueville. Its title translates as On Democracy in America, but English translations are usually simply entitled Democracy in America. In the book, Tocqueville examines the democratic revolution that he believed had been occurring over the previous seven hundred years.

About the author

French writer and politician Alexis de Tocqueville was born in Verneuil to an aristocratic Norman family. He entered the bar in 1825 and became an assistant magistrate at Versailles. In 1831, he was sent to the United States to report on the prison system. This journey produced a book called On the Penitentiary System in the United States (1833), as well as a much more significant work called Democracy in America (1835--40), a treatise on American society and its political system. Active in French politics, Tocqueville also wrote Old Regime and the Revolution (1856), in which he argued that the Revolution of 1848 did not constitute a break with the past but merely accelerated a trend toward greater centralization of government. Tocqueville was an observant Catholic, and this has been cited as a reason why many of his insights, rather than being confined to a particular time and place, reach beyond to see a universality in all people everywhere.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Democracy in America: Book One
• Author: Alexis de Tocqueville
• Translated by: Henry Reeve
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017
• ISBN: 154323206X, 9781543232066
• Length: 470 pages
• Subjects: History / United States / General; Political Science / Political Ideologies / Democracy