Resurrecting Tocqueville for a New Generation of American Democracy

It’s almost incomprehensible for young people today to understand how the great American social experiment rose from the ashes of a tired, burnt-out Europe.

A portrait of French diplomat, historian, and political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville by Théodore Chassériau, 1850. Public domain

Commentary

There is a man whose name is regularly resurrected when looking back to America’s infancy for clues to its greatness and exceptionalism: It’s the name of Alexis de Tocqueville, the diminutive French aristocrat who wrote one of the world’s most significant books and amazingly roamed the very woods and waterways that many of us roam today, nearly 200 years later.