Alexis de Tocqueville

From Philosopedia

Tocqueville, Alexis de (29 July 1805 - 16 April 1859)

An astute French social philosopher, de Tocqueville was briefly foreign minister after the Revolution of 1848.

When he visited the United States, he wrote a classic work about his findings, Democracy in America (2 volumes, 1835), in which he predicted that America’s ideas about social equality and political democracy would one day replace Europe’s aristocratic institutions. However, he was unsure if democracy could ever achieve a high intellectual culture.

He also observed that

• From time to time strange sects arise that endeavor to strike out extraordinary paths to eternal happiness. Religious insanity is very common in the United States.

His books are as follows:

• Du Système Pénitentaire aux États-Unis et de son Application en France (1833, "On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France")
• De la Démocratie (1835), "Democracy in America")
• L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856, "The Old Regime and the Revolution")

De Tocqueville, a Catholic, married Mary Mottely, an English lady, in 1836, He became a member of the French Legion of Honor and in 1841 a member of the French Academy. He died in Cannes, France, of tuberculosis.

Alan Ryan on de Tocqueville's Flaws

Reviewing Hugh Brogan's Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life (2008) in The New York Review of Books (22 November 2007), Alan Ryan points out that in 1831 when he arrived in the United States in 1831 Tocqueville was only twenty-six years old. He hoped to write lessons that French Republicans could learn from his observation of what was going on in America.

Brogan, writes Ryan in a favorable review,

• is acerbically unforgiving of Tocqueville's lapses as a political analyst and a political practitioner. One of the greatest virtues of this book is the fact that its author pulls no punches. [He] notes, for example, that Democracy in America "says almost nothing" about Congress, even though "it was the key to understanding the whole political system"; and that Tocqueville's analysis of the presidency is "unsatisfactory."

Tocqueville is said to have been unable to sympathize with the everyday problems of ordinary people, leading to a grave weakness in his political analysis. In short, he is not a patron of the welfare-state liberalism of the late twentieth century. Ryan also noted that

• As a work of political sociology, Democracy in America is astonishing. As one or two critics mentioned at the time, its only precursor was Montesquieu's Spirit of the Law. Like Montesquieu, Tocqueville was keenly aware that what happened in any particular society was in large part the result of historical contingencies; the point de départ of the United States was for him the fact of its being settled by English Puritans. (It is an old, and entirely fair, criticism that he never paid the same attention to Virginia that he paid to New England.)

His Letters Home

In November 2009, Tocqueville's letter from America, written between the spring of 1831 and February 1832, were published. Frederick Brown, a biographer of Flaubert and Zola, collected and translated them. Hudson Review published samples, and Yale University Press will publish them in 2010.

{CE}