Download or read book Tocqueville s Discovery of America written by Leo Damrosch and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2010-04-07 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Tocqueville s Discovery of America written by Leo Damrosch and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-04-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 1831–32, 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.

Download or read book The Making of Tocqueville s Democracy in America written by James T. Schleifer and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book Tocqueville on American Character written by Michael A. Ledeen and published by Truman Talley Books. This book was released on 2001-10-05 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1831, Alexis De Tocqueville, a twenty-six-year-old French aristocrat, spent nine months travelling across the United States. From the East Coast to the frontier, from the Canadian border to New Orleans, Tocqueville observed the American people and the revolutionary country they'd created. His celebrated Democracy in America, the most quoted work on America ever written, presented the new Americans with a degree of understanding no one had accomplished before or has since. Astonished at the pace of daily life and stimulated by people at all levels of society, Tocqueville recognized that Americans were driven by a series of internal conflicts: simultaneously religious and materialistic; individualistic and yet deeply involved in community affairs; isolationist and interventionist; pragmatic and ideological. Noted author Michael Ledeen takes a fresh look at Tocqueville's insights into our national psyche and asks whether Americans' national character, which Tocqueville believed to be wholly admirable, has fallen into moral decay and religious indifference. Michael Ledeen's sparkling new exploration has some surprising answers and provides a lively new look at a time when character is at the center of our national debate.

Download or read book Traveling Tocqueville s America written by Anne Bentzel and published by C-Span. This book was released on 1998 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Tocqueville in America written by George Wilson Pierson and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 1764 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Making of Tocqueville s America written by Kevin Butterfield and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-11-19 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Tocqueville on America After 1840 written by Alexis de Tocqueville and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-30 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Tocqueville between Two Worlds written by Sheldon S. Wolin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-09 with total page 697 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alexis de Tocqueville may be the most influential political thinker in American history. He also led an unusually active and ambitious career in French politics. In this magisterial book, one of America's most important contemporary theorists draws on decades of research and thought to present the first work that fully connects Tocqueville's political and theoretical lives. In doing so, Sheldon Wolin presents sweeping new interpretations of Tocqueville's major works and of his place in intellectual history. As he traces the origins and impact of Tocqueville's ideas, Wolin also offers a profound commentary on the general trajectory of Western political life over the past two hundred years. Wolin proceeds by examining Tocqueville's key writings in light of his experiences in the troubled world of French politics. He portrays Democracy in America, for example, as a theory of discovery that emerged from Tocqueville's contrasting experiences of America and of France's constitutional monarchy. He shows us how Tocqueville used Recollections to reexamine his political commitments in light of the revolutions of 1848 and the threat of socialism. He portrays The Old Regime and the French Revolution as a work of theoretical history designed to throw light on the Bonapartist despotism he saw around him. Throughout, Wolin highlights the tensions between Tocqueville's ideas and his activities as a politician, arguing that--despite his limited political success--Tocqueville was ''perhaps the last influential theorist who can be said to have truly cared about political life.'' In the course of the book, Wolin also shows that Tocqueville struggled with many of the forces that constrain politics today, including the relentless advance of capitalism, of science and technology, and of state bureaucracy. He concludes that Tocqueville's insights and anxieties about the impotence of politics in a ''postaristocratic'' era speak directly to the challenges of our own ''postdemocratic'' age. A monumental new study of Tocqueville, this is also a rich and provocative work about the past, the present, and the future of democratic life in America and abroad.

Download or read book American Institutions and Their Influence written by Alexis de Tocqueville and published by . This book was released on 1851 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the book, Tocqueville examines the democratic revolution in the United States. It also contains an analysis of why republican representative democracy has succeeded in the United States while failing in so many other places.

Download or read book Alexis de Tocqueville and Democracy in America written by Michael G. Kammen and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Democracy in America written by Alexis de Tocqueville and published by Signet. This book was released on 1956 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Democracy in America is a classic of political philosophy. Hailed by John Stuart Mill and Horace Greely as the finest book ever written on the nature of democracy, it continues to be an influential text on both sides of the Atlantic, above all in the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe.

Download or read book Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in America written by Alexis de Tocqueville and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A selection of Tocqueville's writings on America together with letters and sketches from his traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont.

Download or read book Democracy in America written by Alexis De Tocqueville and published by The Floating Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 1589 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (De la démocratie en Amérique) is a classic text detailing the United States of the 1830s, showing a primarily favorable view by Tocqueville as he compares it to his native France. Considered to be an important account of the U.S. democratic system, it has become a classic work in the fields of political science and history. It quickly became popular in both the United States and Europe. Democracy in America was first published as two volumes, one in 1835 and the other in 1840; both are included in this edition.

Download or read book Nature and History in American Political Development written by James W. Ceaser and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2006-03-31 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this inaugural volume of the Alexis de Tocqueville Lectures, Ceaser traces how certain “foundational” ideas—including nature, history, and religion—have been understood and used over the course of American history. Three commentators challenge his arguments, and a spirited debate about large and enduring questions in American politics ensues.

Download or read book Democracy in America Complete written by Alexis de Tocqueville and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on 2020-09-28 with total page 1320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Chicago Companion to Tocqueville s Democracy in America written by James T. Schleifer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-04-02 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.