French sociologist and political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 1859) traveled to the United States in 1831 to learn about its prisons and returned with a host of broader observations which he codified in “Democracy in America” (1835), probably the most important publications of the 19th century. With his scathing observations on individualism and equality, Tocqueville’s work remains an invaluable reason for America to Europeans and Americans for themselves.
Alexis de Tocqueville was born in 1805 into an aristocratic family not long ago shaken by the revolutionary changes in France. Both parents had been imprisoned during the Reign of Terror. After attending university in Metz, Tocqueville studied law in Paris and was appointed a magistrate at Versailles, where he met his future wife and befriended a fellow lawyer named Gustave de Beaumont.
In 1830, Louis-Philippe, the “bourgeois monarch”, succeeded to the French throne, and Tocqueville’s professional aspirations were temporarily blocked. Failing to proceed, he and Beaumont obtained permission to conduct a study of the American penal system, and in April 1831 they sailed for Rhode Island.
From Sing Sing Prison to the Michigan woods, from New Orleans to the White House, Beaumont and Tocqueville traveled for 9 months by steamboat, stagecoach, horseback and canoe, traveling to America’s penitentiaries and beyond. . In Pennsylvania, Tocqueville spent a week selecting every prisoner at the Eastern State Penitentiary. In Washington, DC, he visited with President Andrew Jackson during visiting hours and exchanged courtesies.
The travelers returned to France in 1832. They quickly published their report, “On the Prison System in the United States and its Application in France,” written mainly by Beaumont. Tocqueville focused on a broader assessment of American society and politics, published in 1835 as “Democracy in America.”
As “Democracy in America” revealed, Tocqueville thought that equality was the wonderful political and social thought of his day, and he believed that the United States provided the most complex instance of equality in motion. He admired American individualism, but warned that a society of people can become atomized and paradoxically consistent when “each citizen, simply being digested by each other, actually gets lost in the crowd.” He intuited that a society of persons lacked the intermediate community structures, such as those provided by standard hierarchies, to mediate associations with the expressed. The effect could be a democratic “tyranny of the majority” in which specific rights have been compromised.
Tocqueville was impressed by much of what he observed in the American way of life, admiring the balance of its economy and wondering at the acceptance of its churches. Additionally, he noted the irony of the freedom-loving nation’s mistreatment of Native Americans and their embrace of slavery.
In 1839, with the publication of the next volume of “Democracy in America” approaching, Tocqueville re-entered political life, serving as a deputy in the French assembly. After the Europe-wide revolutions of 1848, he briefly served as Louis Napoleon’s foreign minister before being forced out of politics once again when he refused to assist in Louis Napoleon’s coup.
He retired to his family’s estate in Normandy and began writing a history of contemporary France, the first volume of which was printed as “The Old Regime and the French Revolution” (1856). He blamed the French Revolution on the crisis among the nobility, as well as the political disillusionment of the French public. Tocqueville’s plans for later volumes were cut short by Tocqueville’s death from tuberculosis in 1859.