The Man Who Understood Democracy The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville

"Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)-who was born in the shadow of the French Revolution and died a few years before the American Civil War-witnessed a remarkable era in the history of the West. His aristocratic family survived the revolutionary period, though many branches were cut down during the Terror, and Alexis grew up with a keen understanding that one world was ending and a new one was being born. Adventurous and curious, he traveled extensively in North America as a young man. There, he trained his observant eyes on his official duties-documenting conditions in the prison system-but became fascinated with America's experiments in democracy. Tocqueville was an avid political theorist, and he recorded his impressions in Democracy in America, still read to this day and considered one of the most provocative and insightful commentaries on the American experience. Tocqueville remained both an intellectual and an active politician for the majority of his life. He watched the revolutions take hold in 1848 across Europe, and he died in 1859, after penning his other famous work, The Old Regime and the Revolution. In this book, Olivier Zunz aims to convey how the world in which Tocqueville lived became his laboratory for political theory. Without downplaying Tocqueville's anxieties about the future, or about democracy's potential pathologies, Zunz places dedication to achieving a new kind of democracy at the center of his subject's life and work. He takes seriously Tocqueville's attempts to apply the lessons of his texts to French politics, and, throughout, he looks to Tocqueville's political career and activism as a guide to the meaning of his major texts. Drawing on his unparalleled familiarity with Tocqueville's own words and letters, Zunz offers a definitive biography of a remarkable thinker whose life formed a ligature between the ancien régime and the emerging democratic age"--