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The Third Democracy: Tocqueville's Views of America after 1840

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2004

AURELIAN CRAIUTU  and
JEREMY JENNINGS
AURELIAN CRAIUTU
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington
JEREMY JENNINGS
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham, U.K.
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Abstract

Tocqueville's Democracy in America offered the image of an accomplished and successful democratic regime. Although Tocqueville never wrote a third volume, he continued to be interested in American political events and exchanged a number of important letters with his American friends after 1840. Did Tocqueville change his views on America outlined in the two volumes published in 1835 and 1840? If so, did the evolution of his views of America affect his theory of democracy? The paper answers these questions by examining Tocqueville's unduly neglected correspondence with his American friends. It seeks to reconstruct what Volume Three of Democracy in America might have looked like if it had ever been written. In these letters, Tocqueville addressed important topics such as the instability of the market and the immaturity of American democracy, issues that did not loom large in the two published volumes. The paper shows that in the last years of his life Tocqueville became very disenchanted with American political life and reassessed some of his previous views of American democracy.

I, who am half Yankee.

Tocqueville (1986, 185)

Type
ARTICLES
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 98 , Issue 3 , August 2004 , pp. 391 - 404
Copyright
© 2004 by the American Political Science Association

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