The writings of Alexis de Tocqueville are widely recognized as an indispensable resource for coming to terms with the political and spiritual condition of modern man. To be sure, some commentators continue to read him merely as the author of a travelogue, albeit one that is still remarkably relevant, rather than as the political philosopher and political sociologist that he was. The “making of democracy in America” included prodigious amounts of reading and reflection; it was much, much more than a simple chronicling of his experiences in the United States between May 1831 and February 1832. The nineteenth-century French statesman and political thinker Pierre Paul Royer-Collard was more on mark when he compared Tocqueville’s achievement in Democracy in America to Aristotle’s Politics and Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws.
Tocqueville kept two verbatim notebooks of the conversations he had with a host of American interlocutors from the famous (President Jackson, Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams, Charles Carroll of Carrrolltown) to those influential or intellectually astute figures who could illuminate essential features of American life and politics (John Spencer, Jared Sparks, and Francis Lieber come to mind). He also wrote charming and instructive letters from North America to his family and friends, which he requested be kept safe. Without the firsthand experience of American things, Democracy in America would lack texture and a sure feel for what was truly distinctive about American democracy.
A new volume of the letters has been assembled in Letters from America,
