Review of Democracy in America by Alexis De Tocqueville

Interesting Insight into Comparative History

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835; reprinted, New York: A Bantam Classic, 2000)

Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville, is an important work for both United States historians and comparative historians. Although his work purports to be solely about America, as the title would imply, it is actually a comparison of France and the United States, particularly in the realms of democracy and liberty. With the stated goal of examining the American system, yet actually comparing the United States and France, it would seem that de Tocqueville is, to some extent, an implicit comparativist. Yet there are places within the book in which he makes his comparisons quite explicit. The way in which he switches between the two types of comparison is an interesting avenue for examination. Furthermore, de Tocqueville's writing could be interpreted as an argument for the exceptional nature of American history, and should be considered in light of the debate over American exceptionalism.

Although de Tocqueville came to the United States with the stated intention of studying the prison system in this country, it seems more likely that he wanted to study the American system as a whole. His publication of Democracy in America lends substantial credence to this theory. In this book, he covers nearly every imaginable aspect of American government, politics, society, and culture. The amount of data he presents is overwhelming, but, as Joseph Epstein states in his introduction to the book: "de Tocqueville seems to have understood from the outset that, if his work was to have any power, it would not be through the data he might gather but through what he could make of it-through, in other words, the power of his generalizations." (p. xxx) By comparing what he had observed in the United States to what he knew of France and, on occasion, England, de Tocqueville was able to show the ways in which liberty and democracy had flourished in America and how it differed from the "normal" progression of such things.