This one was dense. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America was definitely one of the thickest books of 2020. I listened to it based on the recommendation of one of my Twitter acquaintances, who, sadly, has mostly left the platform (not that I blame him). Anyway, de Tocqueville came to the United States to see the relatively new republic in action, and the work he wrote when he returned to France remains one of the most timeless books about the United States. It’s quoted by Colin Woodard (who I love), and while I haven’t noticed it quoted in other place, my Twitter acquaintance claims its frequently cited, and I tend to believe him because he loved books like this.

Anyway, I found this book extremely interesting and insightful, and I’m rather devastated I lost most of my notes on it (I took a lot of them) in a great notebook tragedy of 2020 (my cat spilled a pitcher of water over all my stuff). de Tocqueville’s purpose in writing the book was to examine the ‘revolution’ taking place – not an actual bloody revolution, but the social and economic conditions happening in a republican experiment in which the majority of the population bought in.

It was published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840 and focused on several main themes, including the impact of a Puritan founding (which was a lot about the separation of church and state and religious freedom, not common in Europe at the time), the Constitution (the Puritans originally developed the concept of popular sovereignty in some early piece of American political thought and the Founding Fathers developed institutions to protect popular sovereignty, but de Tocqueville argued that freedom is protected more by American habits of thought than any real institution) and the situation of women (where women at the time did not have much more freedom than anywhere else but de Tocqueville did predict they would become ‘just as equal as men.’)

I found Democracy in America a valuable and insightful history book and apparently it’s still studied in political science, sociology, and history spheres. Lots of different view points on the political spectrum like to be able to claim it as a document of support, which I suppose means it does a pretty good job of being well written and neutral.

Readers beware: this book is pretty dense. It’s probably going to take you awhile to get through, but it is interesting and still relevant today.

Tagged: authors: alexis de tocqueville, books: democracy in america, genre: history, genre: non-fiction, genre: political science, genre: sociology