![]() ![]() ![]() Like many talented young men at the time Tocqueville studied the law, becoming a judge in 1827. The insights of Hume, Kant, and others led Tocqueville to give up on his faith and seek secular and rational explanations for politics and morality. As a young man, Tocqueville read the theorists of the Enlightenment. He was born in 1805 to a family in the lower nobility, which had supported Louis XVI during the French Revolution and been imprisoned during the Terror (his great-grandfather, in fact, had been guillotined). Tocqueville himself likely would have been shocked at this development, as he was truly French and, for all of his writings on America, concerned above all with French problems. ![]() Here in New York, even restaurants and hedge funds have taken the august name of Tocqueville. His theories and image are omnipresent in American public life-he is constantly quoted by politicians and journalists, from both the left and the right, while political scientists, sociologists, and historians debate his merits and contribution endlessly. It is all the more surprising, then, that the most influential and authoritative interpreter of the American promise was a French aristocrat named Alexis de Tocqueville. Indeed, bookshelves still groan with new books about the nature of America. Alexis de Tocqueville by Théodore Chassériau, 1850 (Wikimedia Commons)Īmericans have, for centuries, been obsessed with defining their nation and its unique character. ![]()
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