At 19, he wrote a friend that he wished “to roam about for the rest of time.” When he was nearly 30, after Democracy in America became a hit, he lamented: “Oh! How I wish that Providence would present me with an opportunity to use, in order to accomplish good and grand things. In his books, Tocqueville seems like a realist, yet his letters suggest he was a romantic who dreamed of great adventures and endured bouts of depression. Undoubtedly these afflictions were a major reason why he was often irritable.

He suffered migraine headaches, neuralgia, and stomach cramps lasting a week at a time. He worked long hours completing important books despite health problems that plagued him most of his life.

He hardly uttered a word about the industrial revolution that enabled millions to avoid starvation. To be sure, as a member of the landed gentry who earned most of his income from tenant farmers, Tocqueville shared the usual aristocratic prejudices against business enterprise. He envisioned the insidious long-term consequences of government intervention. He had a remarkable mind capable of discerning trends which almost all his contemporaries missed. Tocqueville was a good listener with a keen memory. They tell us about those curious earlier Americans, but Tocqueville tells us about ourselves. Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) and Charles Dickens’ American Notes (1842)-by more clever stylists and more acute observers than Tocqueville, survive only as scholarly footnotes. From Tocqueville’s era, two best-selling books on the United States-Mrs. Boorstin observed: “The most interesting question for the newcomer to Tocqueville is why this book, of all the myriad travel accounts of the United States, should have become a classic-the standard source for generalizing about America. Reflecting on Tocqueville’s famous book Democracy in America, historian Daniel J. “I am neither of the revolutionary party nor of the conservative. “I have a passionate love for liberty, law, and respect for rights,” he wrote. He saw why socialism must lead to slavery. At the same time, he warned that a welfare state could seduce people into servitude. He explained what was needed for democracy to work and how it could help protect human liberty. More than a century and a half ago, when most people were ruled by kings, he declared that the future belonged to democracy. Alexis de Tocqueville was a gentleman-scholar who emerged as one of the world’s great prophets.

De tocqueville books