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Author: Leo Damrosch
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429945737
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
Alexis de Tocqueville is more quoted than read; commentators across the political spectrum invoke him as an oracle who defined America and its democracy for all times. But in fact his masterpiece, Democracy in America, was the product of a young man's open-minded experience of America at a time of rapid change. In Tocqueville's Discovery of America, the prizewinning biographer Leo Damrosch retraces Tocqueville's nine-month journey through the young nation in 1831–1832, illuminating how his enduring ideas were born of imaginative interchange with America and Americans, and painting a vivid picture of Jacksonian America. Damrosch shows that Tocqueville found much to admire in the dynamism of American society and in its egalitarian ideals. But he was offended by the ethos of grasping materialism and was convinced that the institution of slavery was bound to give rise to a tragic civil war. Drawing on documents and letters that have never before appeared in English, as well as on a wide range of scholarship, Tocqueville's Discovery of America brings the man, his ideas, and his world to startling life.
Author: Leo Damrosch
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429945737
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
Alexis de Tocqueville is more quoted than read; commentators across the political spectrum invoke him as an oracle who defined America and its democracy for all times. But in fact his masterpiece, Democracy in America, was the product of a young man's open-minded experience of America at a time of rapid change. In Tocqueville's Discovery of America, the prizewinning biographer Leo Damrosch retraces Tocqueville's nine-month journey through the young nation in 1831–1832, illuminating how his enduring ideas were born of imaginative interchange with America and Americans, and painting a vivid picture of Jacksonian America. Damrosch shows that Tocqueville found much to admire in the dynamism of American society and in its egalitarian ideals. But he was offended by the ethos of grasping materialism and was convinced that the institution of slavery was bound to give rise to a tragic civil war. Drawing on documents and letters that have never before appeared in English, as well as on a wide range of scholarship, Tocqueville's Discovery of America brings the man, his ideas, and his world to startling life.
Author: Kevin Butterfield
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022629708X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
Alexis de Tocqueville famously said that Americans were "forever forming associations" and saw in this evidence of a new democratic sociability--though that seemed to be at odds with the distinctively American drive for individuality. Yet Kevin Butterfield sees these phenomena as tightly related: in joining groups, early Americans recognized not only the rights and responsibilities of citizenship but the efficacy of the law. A group, Butterfield says, isn't merely the people who join it; it's the mechanisms and conventions that allow it to function and, where necessary, to regulate itself and its members. Tocqueville, then, was wrong to see associations as the training grounds of democracy, where people learned to honor one another's voices and perspectives--rather, they were the training grounds for increasingly formal and legalistic relations among people. They were where Americans learned to treat one another impersonally.
Author: James T. Schleifer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226737055
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 213
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Book Description
One of the greatest books ever to be written on the United States, Democracy in America continues to find new readers who marvel at the lasting insights Alexis de Tocqueville had into our nation and its political culture. The work is, however, as challenging as it is important; its arguments can be complex and subtle, and its sheer length can make it difficult for any reader, especially one coming to it for the first time, to grasp Tocqueville’s meaning. The Chicago Companion to Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” is the first book written expressly to help general readers and students alike get the most out of this seminal work. Now James T. Schleifer, an expert on Tocqueville, has provided the background and information readers need in order to understand Tocqueville’s masterwork. In clear and engaging prose, Schleifer explains why Democracy in America is so important, how it came to be written, and how different generations of Americans have interpreted it since its publication. He also presents indispensable insight on who Tocqueville was, his trip to America, and what he meant by equality, democracy, and liberty. Drawing upon his intimate knowledge of Tocqueville’s papers and manuscripts, Schleifer reveals how Tocqueville’s ideas took shape and changed even in the course of writing the book. At the same time, Schleifer provides a detailed glossary of key terms and key passages, all accompanied by generous citations to the relevant pages in the University of Chicago Press Mansfield/Winthrop translation. TheChicago Companion will serve generations of readers as an essential guide to both the man and his work.
Author: George Wilson Pierson
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801855061
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1764
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Book Description
Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, traveled the breadth of America to inquire into the future of French society as revolutionary upheaval gave way to a representative government similar to America's. This text reconstructs from their diaries and letters and newspaper accounts their nine-month tour and evolving analysis of American society.
Author: Alexis de Tocqueville
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521859557
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 577
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Book Description
Tocqueville on America after 1840 provides access to Tocqueville's views on American politics from 1840 to 1859, revealing his shift in thinking and growing disenchantment with America.
Author: Arthur Kaledin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 440
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Book Description
Author: Anne Bentzel
Publisher: C-Span
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont's travels in America in 1831-32 have been retold by C-SPAN. For nine months, the cable TV network retraced the Frenchmen's journey, featuring programming from cities along the route. Now the Tocqueville rediscovery continues with the publication of this unique guide-book. Comprising 47 brief chapters covering cities and small towns that Tocqueville visited, the book allows readers to hear Tocqueville's words while following in his footsteps. Chapters include descriptions of cities and towns, excerpts of what Tocqueville wrote about them, accounts of what Tocqueville and Beaumont did there and details about sights that can be seen today. The book provides telephone numbers and addresses of visitors bureaus, general directions and comparisons of the towns as they are today with what they were like in Tocqueville's era. Traveling Tocqueville's America is the perfect companion for armchair traveler and tourist alike.
Author: Alexis de Tocqueville
Publisher: Library of Alexandria
ISBN: 1613105002
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1320
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Book Description
Amongst the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions. I readily discovered the prodigious influence which this primary fact exercises on the whole course of society, by giving a certain direction to public opinion, and a certain tenor to the laws; by imparting new maxims to the governing powers, and peculiar habits to the governed. I speedily perceived that the influence of this fact extends far beyond the political character and the laws of the country, and that it has no less empire over civil society than over the Government; it creates opinions, engenders sentiments, suggests the ordinary practices of life, and modifies whatever it does not produce. The more I advanced in the study of American society, the more I perceived that the equality of conditions is the fundamental fact from which all others seem to be derived, and the central point at which all my observations constantly terminated. I then turned my thoughts to our own hemisphere, where I imagined that I discerned something analogous to the spectacle which the New World presented to me. I observed that the equality of conditions is daily progressing towards those extreme limits which it seems to have reached in the United States, and that the democracy which governs the American communities appears to be rapidly rising into power in Europe. I hence conceived the idea of the book which is now before the reader. It is evident to all alike that a great democratic revolution is going on amongst us; but there are two opinions as to its nature and consequences. To some it appears to be a novel accident, which as such may still be checked; to others it seems irresistible, because it is the most uniform, the most ancient, and the most permanent tendency which is to be found in history. Let us recollect the situation of France seven hundred years ago, when the territory was divided amongst a small number of families, who were the owners of the soil and the rulers of the inhabitants; the right of governing descended with the family inheritance from generation to generation; force was the only means by which man could act on man, and landed property was the sole source of power. Soon, however, the political power of the clergy was founded, and began to exert itself: the clergy opened its ranks to all classes, to the poor and the rich, the villein and the lord; equality penetrated into the Government through the Church, and the being who as a serf must have vegetated in perpetual bondage took his place as a priest in the midst of nobles, and not infrequently above the heads of kings. The different relations of men became more complicated and more numerous as society gradually became more stable and more civilized. Thence the want of civil laws was felt; and the order of legal functionaries soon rose from the obscurity of the tribunals and their dusty chambers, to appear at the court of the monarch, by the side of the feudal barons in their ermine and their mail. Whilst the kings were ruining themselves by their great enterprises, and the nobles exhausting their resources by private wars, the lower orders were enriching themselves by commerce. The influence of money began to be perceptible in State affairs. The transactions of business opened a new road to power, and the financier rose to a station of political influence in which he was at once flattered and despised. Gradually the spread of mental acquirements, and the increasing taste for literature and art, opened chances of success to talent; science became a means of government, intelligence led to social power, and the man of letters took a part in the affairs of the State. The value attached to the privileges of birth decreased in the exact proportion in which new paths were struck out to advancement. In the eleventh century nobility was beyond all price; in the thirteenth it might be purchased; it was conferred for the first time in 1270; and equality was thus introduced into the Government by the aristocracy itself.
Author: James T. Schleifer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780865972049
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 411
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Book Description
It is impossible fully to understand the American experience apart from Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Moreover, it is impossible fully to appreciate Tocqueville by assuming that he brought to his visitation to America, or to the writing of his great work, a fixed philosophical doctrine. James T. Schleifer documents where, when, and under what influences Tocqueville wrote different sections of his work. In doing so, Schleifer discloses the mental processes through which Tocqueville passed in reflecting on his experiences in America and transforming these reflections into the most original and revealing book ever written about Americans. For the first time the evolution of a number of Tocqueville's central themes--democracy, individualism, centralization, despotism--emerges into clear relief. As Russell B. Nye has observed, "Schleifer's study is a model of intellectual history, an account of the intertwining of a man, a set of ideas, and the final product, a book." The Liberty Fund second edition includes a new preface by the author and an epilogue, "The Problem of the Two Democracies." James T. Schleifer is Professor of History and Director of the Gill Library at the College of New Rochelle
Author: Daniel R. Ernst
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199920869
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
Between 1900 and 1940, Americans confronted a puzzle: how could administrative agencies address the nation's troubles without violating individual liberty? From the close reasoning of judges, the self-interest of lawyers, and the machinations of politicians, an answer emerged. 'Judicialize' agencies' procedures, and a 'rule of lawyers' would keep America free.
