Insights on De Tocqueville's Democracy In America
It has been said that a French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, who
visited the United States in the 1830's, "understood us" in a way that few
observers (foreign and domestic) have. Furthermore, Tocqueville's Democracy in
America is often cited by present-day critics because so many of the
observations in it seem extraordinarily suitable even more than one hundred and
fifty years later. Alexis de Tocqueville was born 1805 into a minor noble family,
in which his grandfather had been guillotined during the French Revolution. He
had come to the United States in 1831 to study the prison system, in which he
did not do, instead he wrote Democracy in America. He had stayed in the United
States through February 1832 for about nine months, so intrigued by democracy,
majority rule, and the absence of social hierarchy. Democracy in America was
first published in 1825, full of observations and interpretations, was written
as a sort of......
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