Alexis de Tocqueville

A contemporary study of the early American nation and its evolving democracy, from a French aristocrat and sociologist. In 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat and ambitious civil servant, set out from post-revolutionary France on a journey across America that would take him 9 months and cover 7,000 miles. The result was Democracy in America, a subtle and prescient analysis of the life and institutions of 19th-century America. Tocqueville looked to the flourishing democratic system in America as a possible model for post-revolutionary France, believing that the egalitarian ideals it enshrined reflected the spirit of the age and even divine will. His study of the strengths and weaknesses of an evolving democratic society has been quoted by every American president since Eisenhower, and remains a key point of reference for any discussion of the American nation or the democratic system.

L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856) is a work by the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville translated in English as either The Old Regime and the Revolution or The Old Regime and the French Revolution. The book analyzes French society before the French Revolution, the so-called "Ancien Régime", and investigates the forces that caused the Revolution. It is one of the major early historical works on the French Revolution. In this book, de Tocqueville develops his main theory about the French revolution, the theory of continuity, in which he states that even though the French tried to dissociate themselves from the past and from the autocratic old regime, they eventually reverted to a powerful central government.

Inspired by a visit to England, Alexis de Tocqueville composed a Memoir on Pauperism in an effort to understand why the most impoverished countries of Europe in his time had the fewest paupers while the most opulent country, England, had the most. It was England's public charity, he found, that had produced a pauper class. This charity had been made possible by a successful economy, but good intentions had produced unforeseen and unfortunate consequences. By removing the necessity for work, Tocqueville argued, public charity bred other miseries - "an idle and lazy class.... If you closely observe the condition of populations among whom such legislation has long been in force, you will easily discover that the effects are not less unfortunate for morality than for public prosperity, and that it depraves men even more than it impoverishes them.". This cogent Memoir on Pauperism is a telling reminder of Tocqueville's political perception and a notable contribution to the idea of civil society. It is here in book form for the first time.

In these pages, Tocqueville tells of the journey he undertook in July 1831 from Detroit to Saginaw with his friend Gustave de Beaumont. Devastated forests, deserts that became cities, persecuted aboriginal peoples: nothing will be the same in America after the arrival of the white man.