Over the past years, I have been asking the students taking my modern political thought class to write an essay imagining what Tocqueville might have said if he visited America today. This open-ended assignment invites them to select a few major concepts from Democracy in America and apply them to our contemporary context. Since there are no fixed answers, my main goal is to stir their imagination and make them think for a moment “like” and “with” Tocqueville.[1] When explaining the assignment, I always remind them that the young Frenchman was only a few years older than them (he was twenty-six year old when he arrived in New York!) and had a great intellectual ambition but almost no first-hand political experience. Tocqueville tried to create a new political science for a new world, as he famously put it in the introduction to Volume One of Democracy in America (1835).  He offered a new way of analyzing social and political phenomena, one that went beyond the method used by his contemporaries (including Marx). If Tocqueville came to America with several preconceptions about the fundamental nature and the direction of modern society (which he acquired in part by attending Guizot’s lectures on civilization in Europe and France), he was, however, open to new experiences and willingly embraced new conceptual challenges. America taught him a few unexpected lessons about the equality of conditions, civil society, pluralism, religion, centralization, participatory democracy, the democratic mind, and the limits of affluence.

Read More