Alexis de Tocqueville - Democracy in America and Two Essays on America

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE was born in 1805 into an aristocratic French family with connections to both the Church and the Bourbon monarchy. He acquired his liberal sympathies from intensive study of French and English Constitutional history, which was to prove formative to his lifelong concern with liberty and the availability of choice. Impressive academic achievements led to a legal career in government service in 1827. It was as a junior magistrate at Versailles that he met Gustave de Beaumont, the man with whom he would travel to America to prepare a study of their penal system for the French government.

After a lengthy journey around the United States with his companion, Tocqueville left the report on penal reform for Beaumont to complete, and turned his attention to other work. The result of this was his hugely influential two-volume Democracy in America, the first volume of which was published in 1835 (at which point he also married Mary Mottley, an Englishwoman) and the second in 1840. The book secured both his reputation as a writer and thinker, and his election to the prestigious Acadmie Franaise in 1841.

In 1839 Tocqueville was elected to the Chambre des Dputs, a post he held until the 1848 revolution when he abandoned politics after a brief period as foreign minister to Louis Bonaparte.

His last, and arguably most significant, work, LAncien Rgime and the French Revolution, was partially published in 1856. Tocqueville died in 1859 prior to its completion.

GERALD BEVAN was educated at King Edwards School, Five Ways, in Birmingham, St Johns College, Cambridge, where he studied Modern and Medieval Languages, and Balliol College, Oxford. His career in the teaching of French, Latin and Religious Studies ended in 1993 at St Albans School, as Director of Studies and Head of Modern Languages. He specializes in French literature from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. He collaborated in a translation of Cassiodorus De Anima during the 1970s and retirement is now allowing him to expand his interest in translation.

ISAAC KRAMNICK is the Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Government and the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. His writings in political theory include studies of Bolingbroke and Burke, and Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism. He is the co-author (with Barry Sheerman, MP) of a biography of Harold Laski and a co-author (with R. Laurence Moore) of a book on church and state in America, The Godless Constitution. He has also edited The Federalist Papers and Thomas Paines Common Sense for Penguin Classics and the Portable Enlightenment Reader for Viking.

ALEXIS DE
TOCQUEVILLE

and Two Essays on America

Translated by GERALD E. BEVAN
with an Introduction and Notes by
ISAAC KRAMNICK

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These translations of Democracy in America, Two Weeks in the Wilderness, and Excursion to Lake Oneida first published in 2003.

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Translations and Translators Note copyright Gerald Bevan, 2003

Introduction and Notes copyright Isaac Kramnick, 2003

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