Harvey C. Mansfield.  Tocqueville: A Very Short Introduction.  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)

Excerpt:

What sort of man was Alexis de Tocqueville? A writer, certainly, and with great style, but a writer of nonfiction conveying fact and truth in compelling terms with brilliant formulations. A social scientist, but without the cumbersome methodology, the hands-off neutrality, the pretended objectivity of today’s version. Tocqueville was a defender and reformer of politics, scientific in some ways but never permitting science to obstruct those goals. A historian? Yes, because he wrote of democracy in America, then and now its principal abode, and of the old regime in France, where according to him democracy—surprisingly, in the form of rational administration by a monarchy—began. He did not write like a theorist, as if he were abstracted from time and place. Yet he was a seeker of causes, not a plain narrator, and he chose to write about the most important events, the “first causes,” he went so far as to say. A philosopher? A difficult question, to which many who identify philosophy with system say no. I say yes, more of a philosopher than he appears to be. We can settle on “thinker,” a less ambitious word for a man who had his doubts about philosophy.

A great man? For certain. A great man for his insight, but also because he undertook to explain greatness in a democratic age when it was under attack or simply overlooked. A great man who associated democracy and liberty with greatness.

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