Historical Figure
Alexis de Tocqueville
d. 1859
French diplomat, political philosopher and historian (1805–1859)
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Biography
Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville, was a French diplomat, political philosopher and historian. He is best known for his works Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). In both, he analyzed the living standards and social conditions of individuals as well as their relationship to the market and state in Western societies. Democracy in America was published after Tocqueville's travels in the United States and is today considered an early work of sociology and political science.
Timeline
The story of Alexis de Tocqueville, told in moments.
Traveled to America at 25 on the pretext of studying its prison system. Spent nine months crisscrossing the country by stagecoach, steamboat, and horseback, interviewing everyone from President Andrew Jackson to frontier settlers.
Published the first volume of Democracy in America. He was 29. The book predicted that America and Russia would each "hold in its hands the destinies of half the world." He wrote this 114 years before the Cold War.
Died of tuberculosis in Cannes at 53. His work fell into relative obscurity in France but became a cornerstone of American political science.
In Their Own Words (20)
The last thing abandoned by a party is its phraseology, because among political parties, as elsewhere, the vulgar make the language, and the vulgar abandon more easily the ideas that have been instilled into it than the words that it has learnt.
France Before The Consulate, Chapter I: "How the Republic was ready to accept a master", in Memoir, Letters, and Remains, Vol I (1862), p. 266, 1862
History, it is easily perceived, is a picture-gallery containing a host of copies and very few originals.
Variant translation: History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies., 1856
He who seeks freedom for anything but freedom's self is made to be a slave.
Variant translation: The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave., 1856
The regime which is destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement on its immediate predecessor, and experience teaches that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform.
Variant translation: The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform., 1856
The French are … the most brilliant and the most dangerous nation of Europe, and the one that is surest to inspire admiration, hatred, terror, or pity, but never indifference.
Variant translation: The French constitute the most brilliant and the most dangerous nation in Europe and the best qualified in turn to become an object of admiration, hatred, pity or terror but never indifference., 1856
Artifacts (15)
Alexis de Tocqueville - De la démocratie en Amérique, Pagnerre, 1848, tome 1
Alexis de Tocqueville
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