Cheryl B. Welch, "De Tocqueville" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)

Excerpt:

Alexis de Tocqueville was born nearly two centuries ago into what he himself characterized as a dying breed of anachronistic aristocrats.  Yet his work seems to retain a greater measure of normative and explanatory power—and intellectual provocation—than that of many other nineteenth-century thinkers who are read today only to illuminate the historical genealogy of ideas.  Tocqueville’s readers still turn to him for more direct intellectual sustenance, and they are both many and surprisingly varied.  It is the underlying purpose of tis book to explore this paradox, to probe the appeal of ‘M. de Tocqueville’ and the ability of his texts to shape our awareness of some of the central tensions of political life as it has been lived in the late twentieth century.

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