Travels With Tocqueville Beyond America

Alexis de Tocqueville famously wrote about democracy in America, but he also lauded Catholic society in Quebec, feared the nationalism he saw in Germany, and controversially defended French colonization of Algeria. Jeremy Jennings traces Tocqueville's lesser-known travels, recovering the wider insights of one of history's great political thinkers.

A revelatory intellectual biography of Tocqueville, told through his wide-ranging travels—most of them, aside from his journey to America, barely known. It might be the most famous journey in the history of political thought: in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville sailed from France to the United States, spent nine months touring and observing the political culture of the fledgling republic, and produced the classic Democracy in America. But the United States was just one of the many places documented by the inveterate traveler. Jeremy Jennings follows Tocqueville’s voyages—by sailing ship, stagecoach, horseback, train, and foot—across Europe, North Africa, and of course North America. Along the way, Jennings reveals underappreciated aspects of Tocqueville’s character and sheds new light on the depth and range of his political and cultural commentary. Despite recurrent ill health and ever-growing political responsibilities, Tocqueville never stopped moving or learning. He wanted to understand what made political communities tick, what elite and popular mores they rested on, and how they were adjusting to rapid social and economic change—the rise of democracy and the Industrial Revolution, to be sure, but also the expansion of empire and the emergence of socialism. He lauded the orderly, Catholic-dominated society of Quebec; presciently diagnosed the boisterous but dangerously chauvinistic politics of Germany; considered England the freest and most unequal place on Earth; deplored the poverty he saw in Ireland; and championed French colonial settlement in Algeria. Drawing on correspondence, published writings, speeches, and the recollections of contemporaries, Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America is a panoramic combination of biography, history, and political theory that fully reflects the complex, restless mind at its center.

Translation of notebooks kept by the author during his last visit to America in 1831-32.

Tocqueville's Voyages is a collection of Newly written essays by some of the most well-known Tocquevillian scholars today. The essays in the fisrt part of the volume explore the development of Tocqueville's thought, his intellectual voyage during his trip to America and while writing Domocracy in America. The second part of the book focuses on the dissemination of Tocqueville's ideas beyond the Franco-American contect of 1835-1840 in places such as Argentina, Japan and Eastern Europe. This book gives readers unprecedented access to the development of Tocqueville's thought as seen through the eyes of preeminent Tocquevillian scholars. Not only do the essays shed fresh light on the ideas in Democracy in America, but they also invite readers to reassess previous interpretations of Tocqueville's great work and to consider its continued relevance to the world.

What does it mean to be an American, and what can America be today? To answer these questions, celebrated philosopher and journalist Bernard-Henri Lévy spent a year traveling throughout the country in the footsteps of another great Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America remains the most influential book ever written about our country. The result is American Vertigo, a fascinating, wholly fresh look at a country we sometimes only think we know. From Rikers Island to Chicago mega-churches, from Muslim communities in Detroit to an Amish enclave in Iowa, Lévy investigates issues at the heart of our democracy: the special nature of American patriotism, the coexistence of freedom and religion (including the religion of baseball), the prison system, the “return of ideology” and the health of our political institutions, and much more. He revisits and updates Tocqueville’s most important beliefs, such as the dangers posed by “the tyranny of the majority,” explores what Europe and America have to learn from each other, and interprets what he sees with a novelist’s eye and a philosopher’s depth. Through powerful interview-based portraits across the spectrum of the American people, from prison guards to clergymen, from Norman Mailer to Barack Obama, from Sharon Stone to Richard Holbrooke, Lévy fills his book with a tapestry of American voices–some wise, some shocking. Both the grandeur and the hellish dimensions of American life are unflinchingly explored. And big themes emerge throughout, from the crucial choices America faces today to the underlying reality that, unlike the “Old World,” America remains the fulfillment of the world’s desire to worship, earn, and live as one wishes–a place, despite all, where inclusion remains not just an ideal but an actual practice. At a time when Americans are anxious about how the world perceives them and, indeed, keen to make sense of themselves, a brilliant and sympathetic foreign observer has arrived to help us begin a new conversation about the meaning of America.

Tocqueville on America after 1840 provides access to Tocqueville's views on American politics from 1840 to 1859, revealing his shift in thinking and growing disenchantment with America.

THE FIRST EXAMINATION OF DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA AND WHY IT WORKED IN AMERICA AND FAILED IN MOST OTHER PLACES. Alexis de Tocqueville believed political equality, common in early America, built a strong foundation for democracy, a kind of government in which power belongs with the people and choices are made by the majority. De Tocqueville explains why republican representative democracy has succeeded in the United States while failing in so many other places. Democracy in America is part of the U.S. Heritage series a book that helped establish and form the United States of America. The revolutionary ideas and inspirational writings are included in this book for everyone, for students of all ages, to people who are actively involved in politics and their community and anyone interested in the amazing birth and history of America. LEARN WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AN AMERICAN! HUMANIX BOOKS U.S. Heritage series is the definitive collection of political writings and history of the Founding Fathers that paved the way for the United States of America to become the indispensable nation and THE example of Democracy, Liberty and Freedom in the world.

This text contains the first volume of Democracy in America, a classic French text by Alexis de Tocqueville that describes the societal changes that he believed had been transpiring over the previous seven hundred years towards a more democratic system. This text outlines his ideas about how the socio-economic conditions of men were becoming more egalitarian, the origins and causes of which he believed to be intrinsic in factors such as the ability of all men to enter the clergy and increasing opportunities in trade and commerce. An engaging and comprehensive analysis pertaining to the evolution of democracy, this two-part classic is a necessary addition to every socio-economic compendium. Alexis de Tocqueville was a French political thinker and historian best known for Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). He was active in French politics and retired from his political career after Louis NapolEon Bonaparte's 1851 coup. This edition has been republished with a new introductory biography of the author."