Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville was a young French aristocrat, from a family that had lost members to the guillotine, who travelled through the United States for nine months in 1831 on the pretext of studying prisons and returned to write Democracy in America, still the best book on the subject. He sat in the Chamber of Deputies, served briefly as foreign minister in 1849, and withdrew from politics after Napoleon III’s coup to write The Old Regime and the Revolution. The Essay on Algeria shows the liberal reasoning as a statesman of empire, and the lists have begun to read it beside the rest.