Alexis de Tocqueville 1805-1859
French politician, traveler, and historian Alexis Charles Henri Clérel de Tocqueville toured the United States from 1831 to 1832 and afterward wrote
Democracy in America
a widely influential study of institutions, from 1835 to 1840.
People today consider his major published early work of sociology and science. An eminent representative of the classical liberal tradition, Tocqueville actively participated first under the monarchy of July 1830. Tocqueville despised this monarchy but began his career in the same period.
After Alexis de Tocqueville obtained a law degree, people named him auditor-magistrate at the court of Versailles. He met Gustave de Beaumont, a prosecutor substitute, who collaborated on various literary works. People sent them to the penitentiary system. During this trip, they authored {book:Du système pénitentiaire aux Etats-Unis et de son application] (1832). Tocqueville went back and worked as lawyer.
Tocqueville met the English economist Nassau William Senior in 1833, and they, good friends, corresponded for many years.
Tocqueville published his master-work.
The success of this work, an early model for the science, known as sociology, led people to name him knight of the Legion of Honor in 1837.
People elected Tocqueville in the next year of 1838 to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques.
Thus, Tocqueville served Valognes from 1839 as deputy of the department of Manche.
In 1841, people elected Tocqueville to the academy. Apart from Canada, Tocqueville also made an observation of England and produced
Memoir on Pauperism
. In 1841, he visited Algeria. This first visit inspired him in Travail sur l'Algérie to criticize the model of colonization, based on an assimilationist view and to prefer instead the British model of indirect rule, which mixed not different populations together.
People also elected Tocqueville as general counselor of the Manche in 1842.
In 1846, Tocqueville went to Algeria. He went as far as openly advocating racial segregation between the European colonists and the "Arabs" through the implementation of two different legislative systems, effectively implemented with the indigenous code, thirty-five years later.
In parliament, Tocqueville defended abolitionist views and upheld free trade, while regime of Louis Philippe carried on the colonization of Algeria with his support. The monarchy fell and ended during the revolution of February 1848. Tocqueville sided with the parti de l'Ordre against the "socialists" and workers. A few days after the insurrection, he thought that a violent clash with the population of the workers agitated in favor of a "social republic." People elected Tocqueville as a member of the constituent assembly of 1848, and he served as a member of the commission, charged with the drafting of the new constitution of the second Republic from 1848.
Tocqueville participated then during the second Republic from 1849. From 1849, he served as the president of the conseil général of the department of Manche.
He defended bicameralism (two parliamentary chambers) and the election of the President of the Republic by universal suffrage. As the countryside was thought to be more conservative than the laboring population of Paris, universal suffrage was conceived as a means to block the revolutionary spirit of Paris.
Tocqueville maintained position as deputy until 1851. He served as the president of the conseil général of the department of Manche to 1851. The second Republic ended to 1851. After coup of Louis Napoléon Bonaparte of 2 December 1851, Tocqueville retired from life and thereafter began work on The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume I.
People best know this thinker for his The Old Regime and the Revolution in 1856
“Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things;it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits. After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”