Introduction

In the year 1835, most of Europe was still in the grip of the conservative reaction that followed the French Revolution and fall of Napoleon. While liberal ideas were a force in public life in England and France, even there political power was in the hands of a small minority. Elsewhere, the spirit that prevailed was that of Prince Metternich, the minister of the Austrian Empire and sworn enemy of liberalism, nationalism, and democracy. When uprisings against this rigid order did occur, as in some of the Italian states or in Spain, they were quickly and easily crushed.

In that year, a work appeared in Paris, written by a 30-year-old French aristocrat. In the Introduction, the author states:

The gradual development of the principle of equality is a Providential fact. It has all the chief characteristics of such a fact: It is universal, it is lasting, it constantly eludes all human interference, and all events as well as all men contribute to its progress. The gradual and progressive development of social equality is at once the past and the future of mankind. To attempt to check democracy would be to resist the will of God.

The writer who thus challenged the official ideology of his time was Alexis de Tocqueville, and the work in which these words appear is his Democracy in America, at once a masterpiece of political philosophy and the best character analysis of the American people ever written.

In what follows we will discuss the life of Alexis de Tocqueville, including his background — which perhaps uniquely fitted him to be a fair and sensitive analyst of the democratic movement — and his famous voyage to the United States, in the company of his close friend, Gustave de Beaumont, Then we will outline the argument of the two parts of Democracy in America, the first published in 1835, the second five years later. How Tocqueville continued his search for the meaning and direction of modern society in his later works will also be suggested. Throughout, excerpts from his notebooks and voluminous correspondence will be cited to throw light on Tocqueville’s passionate, lifelong quest to discover how liberty could be preserved in the modern world.