The Travels of Alexis de Tocqueville 1831–32

The libertarian French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in America in 1831 with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, ostensibly to complete a review of the US penal system, but the trip soon metamorphosed into a grand tour, ranging from Quebec to New Orleans. This odyssey would fuel Democracy in America, a two-volume examination of the society, culture and politics of the United States during the presidency of Andrew Jackson. Tocqueville, an advocate of parliamentary government, found aspects of the American version of democracy praiseworthy: the vigour of its civic society, and economic dynamism empowered by inheritance laws that prevented the ossification of wealth within a landed elite. But he was a master of faint praise and was highly sceptical of America’s majority rule, believing it antithetical to genuine freedom of expression and individuality. Tocqueville travelled through the South at a time when Jackson was enacting the “Trail of Tears” expulsion of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands, and the slavery system was at its height: he eloquently contrasts this “tyranny” with the American profession of freedom. Impressed by the sheer immensity of the American landmass he presciently concluded that America and Russia would each one day “hold in its hands the destinies of half the world”.