BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- Though he was a Frenchman, just 26 years old, touring the fledging United States in 1831 for just nine months, Alexis de Tocqueville made uncannily insightful observations about ...

Alexis de Tocqueville observes how the revolutionary socialists of 1848 failed in France because they alienated the people. In part one of this essay on Alexis de Tocqueville’s Recollections, I looked ...

Alexis de Tocqueville’s pioneering work of sociology, Democracy in America, is often cited, often praised, but rarely read outside of academic circles. The average reader of books and newspapers would ...

Could the Real Christopher Columbus Please Step Forward? A Deep Dive in All Things LBJ Letter from Berkeley: Positively the Last Word on the People’s Park The Forgotten War No Longer Alexis de ...

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) was neither a systematic thinker nor a system builder, neither a philosopher nor a historian. His subject was society—make that societies, their strengths and their ...

It's hard to think of a work that has so influenced our understanding of the United States as this—still the most authoritative, reflective set of observations about American institutions and the ...

Commissioned by the French government to study prisons in the United States, Alexis De Tocqueville, a young aristocrat, allied with neither monarchists nor radicals, returned home in 1832 determined ...

Alexis de Tocqueville was an old-world aristocrat with aspirations as a social scientist. He left revolutionary France and travelled to America in the early nineteenth century. His subsequent volumes, ...

More than 200 European writers toured the United States in the decades after the Napoleonic Wars, publishing mostly contemptuous accounts of the makeshift nation for the delight of their own ...