Democracy in America, Volume 1

Tocqueville came to the United States in 1831 on an official errand to study American prisons and went home with something far larger. This first part, issued in 1835 and given here in Henry Reeve’s English translation, concentrates on political society: the physical setting of North America, the Puritan and Virginian origins of the Anglo-Americans, and the machinery of township, state, and federal government. He works through the courts, the federal constitution, parties, the press, and political associations, arguing that equality of conditions is the generative fact behind all of them. The chapters on the unlimited power of the majority set out his warning about majority tyranny. A long closing chapter assesses the future of the three races living in the republic, including slavery, in the frank terms of his day.