Book

Democracy in America

Alexis de Tocqueville

1835-1840

Saunders and Otley

Associated Ideas, People, and Places

Longread

American Nightmares

Wang Huning and Alexis de Tocqueville’s dark vision of the future.

by Tanner Greer via Scholar's Stage on March 28, 2024
Book Review

‘A Great Democratic Revolution’

Alexis de Tocqueville left France to study the American prison system and returned with the material that would become “Democracy in America.”

by Lynn A. Hunt via New York Review of Books on November 17, 2022
Book Review

Tocqueville’s Uneasy Vision of American Democracy

American government succeeded, Tocqueville thought, because it didn’t empower the people too much.

by Jedediah Britton-Purdy via The New Republic on April 22, 2022

Viewing 1–4 of 4

Highways & Horizons, front and back covers of brochure for the General Motors pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. [Prelinger Library]

Highways and Horizons

The Interstate Highway System created a national polity defined by circulation. To rethink the Interstates is to rethink the United States.

by Reinhold Martin via Places Journal on June 20, 2025

Portrait of Alexis de Tocqueville

Bourgeois Stew: Alexis de Tocqueville

In contrast to feudal society, where everyone, lord or serf, remained rooted to the land, and words were ‘passed on'.

by Oliver Cussen via London Review of Books on November 16, 2023

Trump shaking hands with wealthy supporters.

Even the Founding Fathers Couldn’t Envision a President Like Trump

Reflections on Alexander Hamilton, Alexis de Tocqueville, and the power of the presidency.

by Liesl Schillinger via Literary Hub on February 6, 2020

"Liberty Leading the People," an 1830 painting by Eugene Delacroix.

Religion and the Republic

Looking to the French Revolution and the writings of Tocqueville for insight into Trump’s America.

by Philip Gorski via Public Books on November 14, 2017

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