Democracy in America

A two-volume study of American society and government by a young French aristocrat who travelled through the United States in 1831–32 with Gustave de Beaumont, officially to report on prisons. The first volume, published in 1835, describes equality of conditions as the basic fact of American life and examines its institutions: township self-government, federalism, the courts, the press, political associations and juries. It warns of the 'tyranny of the majority' over opinion as well as law, and closes with a long chapter on the three races, describing the dispossession of Native Americans and the slavery that Tocqueville expected to bring grave conflict. The second volume, published in 1840, is more philosophical, asking how democracy affects thought, feeling and manners. It introduces individualism, the withdrawal into private life, and 'self-interest rightly understood', and fears a new soft despotism: an immense, gentle, tutelary power that keeps citizens in perpetual childhood.

It remains the most quoted analysis of what democracy does to people, and its worries about majority opinion, isolation and an all-providing state still frame debates on both left and right.