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Alexis de Tocqueville on England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Ada Zemach
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Extract

“I have so many feelings and ideas in common with the English that for me England has become a second intellectual home.” So wrote de Tocqueville to one of his English friends, when signs of Napoleonic despotism reappeared in the troubled French skies and alarmed liberals began to worry about final issues and coming dangers.

England and its historical pattern of behavior, its “moeurs”, its institutions and above all the peculiar rhythm of its social development, played a most important part in the general formation of de Tocqueville's thought. The Anglo-Saxon world was in his eyes a fairly bright spot in a gloomy and unhappy European picture, a world from which one could occasionally gather some valuable guiding principles as to the understanding of the continental malady and its possible cure.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , July 1951 , pp. 329 - 343
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1951

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References

1 Oeuvres Completes d'Alexis de Tocqueville (hereafter cited O.C.) T. VII Nouvelle Correspondence), p. 270.Google Scholar

2 It may be of interest to mention that de Tocqueville's forefathers, the Clerels, figure in the roll of Battle Abbey among the companions of William the Conqueror.

3 O.C. VII, p. 134.Google Scholar

4 O.C. VII, p. 135.Google Scholar

5 O.C. VII, pp. 396–7.Google Scholar

6 Oeuvres et Correspondence Inedites, Paris, 1861Google Scholar (hereafter cited C. I.), Vol. II, p. 360.Google Scholar

7 O.C. VIII (Voyage en Angleterre), pp. 367–8.Google Scholar

8 C. I., II, p. 42.Google Scholar

9 The Condition of the Working, Class in 1844, p. 296.Google Scholar

10 It is perhaps worth noting that the novelist and politician, Bulwer-Lytton, , expressed similar views about the English aristocracy in his book England and the English (published in 1833)Google Scholar. He spoke about its peculiar form, distinguishing it from the German nobility, stressed its intimate connection with the moneyed classes and observed in English society “the fusion of all classes each with the other.” De Tocqueville was acquainted with him and on his first visit to England they went together to a political meeting. It is never easy to ascertain influences but it is not impossible that de Tocqueville gathered some of his ideas from the book of this English novelist.

11 O.C. VIII, (Etat Social et Politique de la France avant.et depuis 1789), p. 19.Google Scholar

12 O.C. VIII (Voyage en Angleterre), p. 340.Google Scholar

13 O.C. VIII, pp. 19–20.Google Scholar

14 O.C. VIII, p. 333.Google Scholar

15 Ibid., pp. 333–4.

16 O.C. VIII, p. 337.Google Scholar

17 C. I. I, pp. 314–315.Google Scholar

18 O.C. VIII, p. 347.Google Scholar

19 The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, p. 297.Google Scholar

20 Selected Correspondence (Lawrence, & Wishart, ), p. 147.Google Scholar

21 Ibid., p. 115.