Democracy in America

Democracy in America is the most penetrating analysis of American democratic society ever written, a work whose observations remain startlingly relevant nearly two centuries after its composition. Alexis de Tocqueville identified the tyranny of the majority, the dangers of democratic individualism, and the vital role of civil associations with a clarity and prescience that no subsequent commentator has surpassed.

Begun by a young French aristocrat who traveled through Jacksonian America in the early 1830s, Democracy in America was published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840. Tocqueville's remarkable foresight extended to geopolitics: he predicted that the United States and Russia would emerge as the two great rival powers of the future, an observation that would prove prophetic more than a century later with the onset of the Cold War. The work remains the single most important book ever written about American democracy.