On Tocqueville: Democracy and America

by Alan Ryan

Alan Ryan brilliantly illuminates the observations of the French philosopher who first journeyed to the United States in 1831 and went on to catalog the unique features of the American social contract. Often thought of as the father of "American Exceptionalism," Tocqueville sought to analyze the social conditions of emerging political equality, "a river that may be channeled but cannot be stopped in its course." Struck by the fact that even then "all Americans believed they belonged to the middle class," Tocqueville made prescient observations about American life that remain as relevant today as when they were first written. In Ryan's hands, On Tocqueville becomes the perfect introduction to Tocqueville's two-volume masterpiece, Democracy in America.

Excerpted here are Democracy in America, The Old Regime & Revolution, and selections from Tocqueville's memoir of the 1848 revolution.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, History, Political Science, American History, Nonfiction, Economics

272 pages, Hardcover

First published August 11, 2014

About the author

Alan James Ryan.

Reviews

[Riku Sayuj · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ryan presents a series of representative snippets from most of the chapters of the two volumes. However, the introduction is the more interesting part of the book and any reader who intends to read the original can skip the snippets if required. The introductory essay is pretty good and is a good primer for reading Tocqueville - Ryan discusses the major influences on Tocqueville's thought and throws interesting light on the motivations that colored his observations. Overall, well worth the short read.

[Shane Senécal-Tremblay · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ryan's analysis in this book has all the eloquence of a foreign language text processed through google translate by a server that doesn't recognize punctuation. It is not any such thing of course. Ryan is a distinguished academic at Oxford, who writes in English, which makes his succumbing to such obscure philosophical writing all the more frustrating.

In contrast, the part of the book dedicated to un-analyzed key passages from Democracy in America are quite good. Tocquevilles writing (nearly 200 year old french translated into english) is much more lucid and compelling than anything in Ryan's analysis.

Don't buy this for analysis, just the curated Touqueville passages.

[Oren Mizrahi · Rating 2 out of 5]

the book is 50/25/25 author’s introduction, democracy volume 1 excerpts, volume 2 excerpts. The introduction was a bit drawn out and - as with many introductions to classics - often unnecessary. As for the excerpts, some seem repetitive but many are profound and offer an interesting, often liberal for its time, perspective. His discussion of the role of women in the US and the contrast between Native Americans and African Americans was particularly interesting.

Ryan does a good job of pulling important excerpts but a better introduction might simply be reading a few background articles on toqueville’s life, wikipedia, etc. skip ryan’s introduction.