Tocqueville's Discovery of America [Paperback]

Alexis de Tocqueville is more quoted than read; commentators across the political spectrum invoke him as an oracle who defined America and its democracy for all times. But in fact his masterpiece,Democracy in America, was the product of a young man's open-minded experience of America at a time of rapid change. InTocqueville's Discovery of America, the prizewinning biographer Leo Damrosch retraces Tocqueville's nine-month journey through the young nation in 183132, illuminating how his enduring ideas were born of imaginative interchange with America and Americans, and painting a vivid picture of Jacksonian America.

Damrosch shows that Tocqueville found much to admire in the dynamism of American society and in its egalitarian ideals. But he was offended by the ethos of grasping materialism and was convinced that the institution of slavery was bound to give rise to a tragic civil war.

Drawing on documents and letters that have never before appeared in English, as well as on a wide range of scholarship,Tocqueville's Discovery of Americabrings the man, his ideas, and his world to startling life.

Tocqueville's Discovery of America is lively, always interesting, and oftne touching. It also fills a gap in the literature that was deliberately created by Tocqueville himself. Alan Ryan, The New York Review of Books

[A] scintillating new book . . . Remarkably, given the excitements and reach of Tocqueville's nine-month American trip, it is seventy years since the last full account of the itinerary. Leo Damrosch is well qualified to do the renovation. A distinguished specialist of eighteenth-century literature at Harvard . . . he is deeply familiar with Tocqueville's literary and intellectual contexts . . . Damrosch contagiously enjoys himself, and happily enters into the enthusiasms of the two young Frenchmen, as they let the strange, loud, free, placeless society disturb and excite them. James Wood, The New YorkelC+