Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) was a French aristocrat, writer and political thinker. Democracy in America, the two-volume study of his travels in the young United States, remains the most celebrated analysis of democracy ever written — a prophetic account of equality, individualism, religion and the tyranny of the majority.

Visiting America in 1831 aged twenty-five, Tocqueville returned to produce a political sociology that has never lost its edge. His later L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution studied how the French Revolution grew out of the old order. His reflections on civil society and the conditions that preserve liberty are central to modern conservatism and liberalism alike.