The remarkable prescience of Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) produced what his biographer Hugh Brogan called ‘the greatest book ever written on the United States’. Among the most remarkable things about this work – Brogan was referring to the first volume of Democracy in America, not the more abstract second volume – is that Tocqueville’s journey to the United States lasted just nine months, and was undertaken when he was in his mid-twenties, never to return. Yet the book’s publication, when Tocqueville was still only 29, made him an instant celebrity.

The young French aristocrat was especially pleased by its reception in America, where an unauthorised edition was published in 1838. He wrote to his friend Gustave de Beaumont, with whom he’d made the trip, about a review by a Harvard professor called Edward Everett:

What particularly impressed me was the praise for my impartiality and above all for the great truthfulness of my portraits… I was afraid that I might at times be making monumental errors, principally in the eyes of the people of the country.

‘Of all modern peoples, Americans have pushed equality and inequality furthest among men’

The acclaim was not universal, of course, and several scholars have subsequently taken aim at Tocqueville’s reputation, accusing him of making sweeping generalisations based on a whistlestop tour in which he rarely ventured beyond the company of the social elite. ‘A fact usually omitted in discussions of Tocqueville is the shallow empirical basis of his study,’ wrote Gary Wills in the New York Review of Books in 2004. Tocqueville has been upbraided for failing to notice the rapid industrialisation that was taking place during his visit, as well as being indifferent to the suffering of the black population, a sin he repeated on a later visit to Algeria, where he praised French colonialism. Even at the time, American critics took issue with his warnings about ‘the tyranny of the majority’ – a constant danger in a democracy, he thought – and attributed it to his having witnessed the presidency of Andrew Jackson, whom he met in Washington and was unimpressed by.