Abstract

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) was born into an aristocratic family with strong political connections. He served as a representative in the French Chamber of Deputies starting in 1839 and was briefly Minister of Foreign of Affairs in 1849. As an author, he attained instant fame after publishing the first part of Democracy in America in 1835 (the second part appeared in 1840). In 1838, he was elected to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences and, in 1841, to the even more prestigious French Academy whose forty members were, in principle, the greatest living writers in the French language, known as 'the immortals.' In spite of these achievements, his was an anguished life. He was tormented by the depressing fluctuations of his country between revolution and Bonapartism, and by his own political ineffectiveness. Yet, it was not a failed life. Although he was unable to modify the course of history, he succeeded in articulating a new set of terms for the comprehension of political regimes and how they change. His cultivation of paradoxical theses (for example, that revolutions often occur when improving social conditions create rising expectations), his perception of how cultural values affect government and vice versa, and finally, his capacity to dramatize why the understanding of social institutions is an important part of our search for meaning in life, all this made him a profound historical and sociological thinker. The existential problem at the heart of Tocqueville's identity was that he was a democratically inclined aristocrat.