Book Review: ‘The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville’

A wonderful biography of the Frenchman who best understood America, democracy

"Alexis de Tocqueville," 1850, by Théodore Chassériau. Oil on canvas; 51.7 inches by 38.7 inches. Palace of Versailles. (Public Domain)

Arguably the preeminent scholar on Alexis de Tocqueville has written a new biography on the French aristocrat who defied aristocracy in favor of democracy. Olivier Zunz, the James Madison Professor of History at the University of Virginia, has assembled a studious work on the life of an incredibly studious man.

“The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville” is a wonderfully written biography on the foreigner who arguably best described America politically and socially through his work “Democracy in America.”

The title of the book is indicative of its central theme. Zunz focuses less on Tocqueville the man and more on how his understanding and his pursuit of understanding democracy shaped him, his countrymen, and the political and social landscape of the 19th and 20th centuries, especially in the West.

Learning From French Political Upheaval

Zunz discusses Tocqueville’s early life, particularly regarding the aftermath of the French Revolution. Tocqueville, though born in 1805, just a few short years after the Reign of Terror, was heavily impacted by that Jacobin era, as many of his relatives were executed at the guillotine. He was born, however, during a different reign: the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte.

The French bore constant political and social upheaval, ranging from the Napoleonic Wars to the reinstating of the monarchy, to coups, to republics, to threats of revolutions, to new revolutions, and back to monarchical reign. France of the 19th century provided Tocqueville an endless supply of material. But it was his adventure to America with his friend Gustave de Beaumont to study the country, its politics, and its prisons that propelled him to greatness.

‘Democracy in America’

Tocqueville’s book “Democracy in America” pulls from his travels in America during the presidency of Andrew Jackson. Noted are his travels through various states, as well as his encounters with prominent individuals and statesmen, like John Quincy Adams, Sam Houston, and Jared Sparks, the eventual president of Harvard University (then named Harvard College).

Upon their return home, he and Beaumont set off on the project of prison reform. Their work proved influential, but it was not until Tocqueville wrote his work regarding the young nation across the Atlantic that he was considered the next great political philosopher.

A page from the original working manuscript of "Democracy in America," circa 1840, by Alexis de Tocqueville. Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. (Public Domain)

Tocqueville’s political philosophy is precisely what readers will obtain from this biography. Zunz follows Tocqueville’s course of understanding democracy through American eyes. Tocqueville believes that America figured out how to make democracy work, and points to the people’s ability to allow politics and religion to coexist peaceably (a notion with which France struggled).

Convincing the French

From this point, Tocqueville struggles to convince the French through his writings and his eventual, though relatively short-lived, rise to politics that democracy is the form of government to be embraced, rather than monarchical dictatorships.

In Zunz’s book, Tocqueville does not seem to struggle with his arguments for democracy, despite the continual political and social setbacks that France incurs. In fact, Zunz provides insight into just how Tocqueville’s early writings in “Democracy in America” remain in line with his later writings, such as “The Old Regime and the French Revolution,” and also his correspondences with colleagues and friends, ranging from Beaumont to George Sand to John Stuart Mill.

Insight and Conviction Combined

Incredibly, Tocqueville was not only a man of conviction—which is noble enough in itself—but also a man who was right quite often in those convictions. This is not to say that he was never wrong, or that Zunz attempts to portray him that way. No, there are issues in which Tocqueville proves out of step at times with his own views, at times rather contradictory, such as his disdain for America’s “conquest” of lands at the expense of the natives, while at the same promoting the colonization of Algeria. The author merely presents Tocqueville as a man who was ahead of his time in many ways, while simultaneously being a man of his times in others.

Zunz brings to the forefront many of Tocqueville’s powerful assessments of political and social issues, including religion in society, equality, welfare, democracy (obviously), the dangers of socialism, and, possibly most astounding, his view of how revolutions (if not at least the French Revolution) begin. The author has brought forward the thought processes of a man who was a rarity among thinkers.

That rarity, as made clear in Zunz’s work, was Tocqueville’s gift of insight combined with the strength of conviction. History has shown that people can possess the insight to do or know what is right without having the strength to stand by those insights.

His ability to stand by his convictions when he knew they were right (though he was not incapable of being convinced when he was in error) at times cost him politically. It also cost him in relationships, familial and otherwise. In one instance, when his one-time colleague Arthur de Gobineau wrote and sent for his review “The Inequality of Human Races,” Tocqueville made it clear that he viewed Gobineau’s theories as “quite false” and “very pernicious.”

Cover of "The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville." (Princeton University Press)

Zunz points out, and this merely attributes to Tocqueville’s ability for insight, that he believed the essay would “appeal to the slave owners in the United States and to Germans in their exaltation of the Aryan race.” Gobineau’s work was tragically used in both instances, just as Tocqueville predicted.

A Life Worth Studying

The world was blessed by Tocqueville’s gifts for insight and for putting them down on paper, especially “Democracy in America,” and especially for Americans. Tocqueville rightly felt that America, though only slightly more than 50 years old with a constitution that was younger than that, was a country worth studying and replicating.

He provided Americans and Westerners—indeed, the future generations of the world—a breakdown, if not a roadmap, of a properly coordinated and practiced democracy. Zunz, in his wonderful biography of a brilliant man, has provided us a clear-eyed roadmap for understanding the man who understood democracy.

‘The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville’ By Olivier Zunz Princeton University Press, May 3, 2022 Hardcove: 472 pages