Discovering Tocqueville

Fromv : The Americ Prospect


Photo : http://www.prospect.org/






Tocqueville didn't get everything right about Americans, but understanding him as a real, flawed observer makes his achievement more impressive.
Sean Wilentz March 19, 2010

When the energetic, young French liberal aristocrats Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont toured the United States in 1831 and 1832 ostensibly to study America's prisons, their minds, not surprisingly, often turned to more alluring subjects. "In addition to a very fine library, our host has two charming daughters with whom we get along very well," Tocqueville wrote to his sister-in-law from a well-appointed home in Canandaigua, New York. "Suffice it to say that we gazed at them even more willingly than at their father's books." The visitors found the young women of the New World more boldly coquettish than their French counterparts but also fiercely unwilling (again, unlike the French) to follow through.





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