Alexis de Tocqueville: life, ideas and books

Life

Alexis-Charles-Henri Clerel de Tocqueville was born in Paris in 1805 into a Norman aristocratic family. He trained as a magistrate and in 1831 travelled to the United States to study its prisons, a trip that produced a report on the penitentiary system and, later, his best-known book.

He sat in the Chamber of Deputies for Manche from 1839 to 1848, helped draft the constitution of the Second Republic in 1848 and served briefly as foreign minister in 1849. After opposing Louis Napoleon's coup of December 1851, he withdrew from politics and wrote The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). He died of tuberculosis at Cannes in 1859.

Ideas

In Democracy in America (published in 1835 and 1840) Tocqueville described a society moving toward equality of condition and asked what that would mean for freedom. He admired American local government, religion and voluntary associations as habits that kept citizens active and independent, and he warned of the "tyranny of the majority" and of a mild, paternalistic "soft despotism" in which a centralised state keeps people comfortable and dependent.

In his later work he argued that the French Revolution continued, rather than broke, the centralising tendency of the old monarchy.

Major works

• Democracy in America (1835 and 1840).
• The Penitentiary System in the United States (1833), written with Gustave de Beaumont.
• The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856).

Why conservatives read him

Tocqueville explains why civil society, family, faith and local institutions matter to a free people, and he warns that a government eager to relieve citizens of every burden can weaken their capacity to govern themselves. Conservatives cite him in arguments about federalism, the administrative state, religion in public life and the decline of voluntary associations. Readers on the left and right alike treat him as one of the most acute observers of American democracy.