Fair or unfair, however, it is on Democracy in America that Tocqueville’s reputation as a writer, theorist, historian, political scientist, and social scientist rests, and it is this work that will be the focus of our attention. The still unfinished modern edition of his complete works (begun in 1951) will contain somewhere between thirty and forty volumes an earlier Oeuvres complètes published after Tocqueville’s death in 1861–1866 under the supervision of his travel partner and friend Gustave de Beaumont takes up nine volumes and France’s prestigious Pléiade collection presents a generous selection of Tocqueville’s major works, travel writings, essays, and speeches in three hefty volumes. Besides these two works, Tocqueville wrote many other shorter pieces: government reports, travel essays, academic and political speeches, and countless letters. This lively piece of “life writing” is both highly readable and troubling since, as Paul de Man famously observed, “Autobiography veils a defacement of the mind of which it is itself the cause.”įor somewhat similar reasons, to which must be added the facts of advancing age, illness, and disillusion, The Old Regime and the Revolution is an uncompleted study that a reader may find provocatively stimulating or annoying by turns. Souvenirs has all the daring but also the flaws of many historical memoirs-one enjoys being in the company of a brilliant witness of the revolution of 1848, but one wonders to what degree the accounts he gives are true and truly valuable.

He also wrote two other notable books: the political memoir entitled Souvenirs, written in 1850–1851 shortly after he had left politics but only published posthumously in 1893, and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856).Īlthough they also display Tocqueville’s illuminating, against-the-grain thinking, some readers find these two works less satisfying than Democracy in America, which is the product of a more restless and hopeful young mind. Tocqueville’s masterpiece is Democracy in America, published in two volumes, five years apart, in 18.

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