Alexis de Tocqueville

A new translation of this classic text The Ancien Regime and the Revolution is a comparison of revolutionary France and the despotic rule it toppled. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) is an objective observer of both periods—providing a merciless critique of the ancien regime, with its venality, oppression and inequality, yet acknowledging the reforms introduced under Louis XVI, and claiming that...

The continuation of Alexis de Tocqueville's great meditation on the origins and meanings of the French Revolution. With his monumental work The Old Regime and the Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59)—best known for his classic Democracy in America—envisioned a multivolume philosophical study of the origins of modern France that would examine the implications of French history on the nature and...

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) came to America in 1831 to see what a great republic was like. What struck him most was the country's equality of conditions, its democracy. The book he wrote on his return to France, Democracy in America, is both the best ever written on democracy and the best ever written on America. It remains the most...