It was at university that he experienced his first existential crisis, his discovery of agnostic philosophy, which would periodically come back to haunt him time and again even though he professed enduring fidelity to Catholicism while apparently retaining nagging doubts throughout his life (he was Catholic, but certainly no dogmatist).

The young Alexis was educated in classics and church theology by a tutor, before attending university and studying law and history.

It also made him aware of the need for reform to avoid bloody social revolution. This made him acutely perceptive to the dangers of demagogic tyranny. A World in Transformation Born into an aristocratic military family that was decimated by the Terror of the French Revolution, Tocqueville grew up in the milieu of the Restoration after the collapse of the tyrannical French republic and the despotism of Napoleon Bonaparte. True democracy in Tocqueville’s eyes can only exist with strong republican institutions and laws supporting it because only strong republican institutions and laws ensure the relative calm and order which permits social freedom to flourish. Citizens choose to improve their lives on their own volition without fear of political repercussion. Tocqueville’s democracy, then, is a republic (that legal and constitutional framework with strong civil and legal institutions) where individual will, activity, and life is open to its citizenry. Rather, it is the liberty and equality enshrined by law and protected by strong institutions and a legal framework-a constitution-that upholds and promotes liberty and equality. For Tocqueville, democracy is not majoritarian rule. Tocqueville came to believe that the “measure of any form of government…was liberty and equality.” How, exactly, did this aristocrat turned nuanced champion of democracy embrace a republican form of democratic governance where “all citizens the liberty to act within an agreed-upon legal framework”? It is important to use and understand Tocqueville’s definition of democracy from the onset to know what he meant by democracy and what enamored him to write Democracy in America instead of our own contemporary prejudices. After all, his most famous work, Democracy in America, is a grand treatise over the American democratic experiment and remains an indispensable book on the nature of American politics especially as seen by a foreign sympathizer but also filled with warnings of potential danger to the grand experiment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.Īlexis de Tocqueville’s name is synonymous with democracy. The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis De Tocqueville.

Tocqueville's