Souvenirs of revolution

Alexis de Tocqueville is the author of three great books: Democracy in America, The Old Regime and the Revolution, and the posthumously published Recollections of the French Revolution of 1848. The first two are carefully crafted and philosophically astute guides to the “democratic revolution” that was in the process of transforming the Western Christian world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As a statesman and political philosopher, Tocqueville hoped against hope that this revolution would culminate in a human and political order consistent with liberty and human dignity, doing justice to both the equality of human beings and the “greatness” of man, which transcended the horizon of democratic equality. In these works, his rhetoric is measured and eloquent, carefully calibrated to the great task of...