Alexis Henri Charles Clérelde, wicehrabia de Tocqueville (ur. 29 lipca 1805 w Verneuil-sur-Seine, zm. 16 kwietnia 1859 w Cannes) – francuski myśliciel i polityk, zwolennik liberalizmu arystokratycznego. Minister spraw zagranicznych II Republiki.

Autor dwutomowego dzieła O demokracji w Ameryce, uchodzącego za najbardziej przenikliwą analizę społeczeństwa demokratycznego. Szczególne znaczenie mają jego analizy konfliktu między wolnością i równością, pożytków płynących z samorządu i stowarzyszeń politycznych[1] oraz relacji między państwem a Kościołami. Był jednym z najważniejszych myślicieli w XIX wieku ze względu na stworzenie hasła liberalnej demokracji. Uważał on, iż demokracja nie jest szkodliwa tylko wówczas gdy nie zagraża wolności i autonomii jednostki.

W dziele Dawny ustrój i rewolucja, na przykładzie rewolucji francuskiej postawił tezę, że rewolucja stanowi zawsze kontynuację obalanego ustroju oraz, że wybucha nie w momencie najgłębszego kryzysu, ale kiedy sytuacja poprawia się wolniej niż oczekuje tego społeczeństwo.

Alexis de Tocqueville nie był zwolennikiem demokracji liberalnej, lecz uważał, że jej nadejście do Europy jest nieuniknione i chciał na nią Europejczyków przygotować.

Dzieła
* O demokracji w Ameryce, Warszawa 1976
* Wspomnienia, Ossolineum 1987
* Dawny ustrój i rewolucja, Warszawa 2005
* Listy z Rosji

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The Teaching Company - William R. Cook - Tocquevil le and the American Experiment (2004).jpg

How is it possible that perhaps the greatest book about U.S. democracy ever written was penned by a Frenchman visiting this country some 175 years ago? Why is it still relevant in today’s ever-changing political landscape?

Now you can draw your own conclusions as you join Professor William R. Cook for a spirited exploration of Alexis de Tocqueville and his unique observations of this young nation that resulted in the two volumes of Democracy in America.

Democracy and Our National Identity

Democracy is so much a part of our national identity as to be inseparable from it. It is all too easily taken for granted as we live our daily lives, debate our country’s issues, freely criticize our leaders, and cast our ballots.

But in today’s world, when we are also trying to understand how to make democracy a part of the national identity of other nations, an in-depth understanding of this remarkable political system is especially relevant.

What is American democracy, and why has it flourished? Is there something unique in our national character, in our social fabric and communities, that makes the United States especially fertile ground for the growth of democracy? Can American democracy be exported? Does it naturally fortify itself over time? Or do its benefits, ironically, work to undermine its strengths?

After more than two centuries of living with democracy, fundamental questions like these often go unasked.

Yet there was a time when the unique relationship between the American people and their government was still new, barely two generations old, and these questions were very much at the forefront of the age’s greatest minds.

One of those minds belonged to a 25-year-old French nobleman, a lawyer named Alexis de Tocqueville, who journeyed here in 1831, and whose written observations at that time left us a lasting and provocative look at U.S. democracy’s formative years.

Tocqueville took this journey with another young lawyer, Gustave de Beaumont, who had written a report on French prisons. Although the official purpose of the trip was to research innovations in the American penal system, the two of them—especially Tocqueville—had in mind a much broader use of the credentials provided them by their own government.

Tocqueville wanted to observe firsthand the successful political experiment that was evolving in the United States and take his findings home to France, which was itself trying to shape its own young democracy.

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Audiobook - The Teaching Company - William R. Cook - Tocqueville and the American Experiment (2004) Read by the Author (743m15s).mp3

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Joseph Epstein - Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy' s Guide (2006).jpg

Alexis de Tocqueville was among the first foreigners to recognize and trumpet the grandness of the American project. His two-volume classic, Democracy in America, published in 1835, not only offered a vivid account of what was then a new nation but famously predicted what that nation would become. His startling prescience, as well as the endurance of his political ideas, has firmly established Tocqueville's place in American history; his chronicle of our infancy is a fixture on every American history syllabus. Nearly all of his clairvoyant predictions about American political life, from the influence of Evangelical Christianity to the advent of our "consumer society," have come true—and on the schedule he set.

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Cheryl B. Welch - The Cambridge Companion to Tocqu eville (2006).jpg

The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville contains a set of critical interpretive essays by internationally renowned scholars on the work of Alexis de Tocqueville. The essays cover Tocqueville's major themes (liberty, equality, democracy, despotism, civil society, religion) and texts (Democracy in America, Recollections, Old Regime and the Revolution, other important reports, speeches and letters). The authors analyze both Tocqueville's contributions as a theorist of modern democracy and his craft as a writer. Collections of secondary work on Tocqueville have tended to fall into camps, either bringing together only scholars from one point of view or discipline, or treating only one major text. This Companion transcends national, ideological, disciplinary, and textual boundaries to bring together the best in recent Tocqueville scholarship. The essays not only introduce Tocqueville's major themes and texts, but also put forward provocative arguments that advance the field of Tocqueville studies.

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Matthew Mancini - Alexis de Tocqueville and Americ an Intellectuals, From His Times to Ours (2005).jpg

Alexis de Tocquev... - Matthew Mancini - Alexis de Tocqueville and Ameri...ican Intellectuals, From His Times to Ours 2005.jpg

Comprehensive in its chronology, the works it discusses, and the commentators it critically examines, Alexis de Tocqueville and American Intellectuals tells the surprising story of Tocqueville's reception in American thought and culture from the time of his 1831 visit to the United States to the turn of the twenty-first century.

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Richard Swedberg - Tocqueville's Political Economy (2009).jpg

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) has long been recognized as a major political and social thinker as well as historian, but his writings also contain a wealth of little-known insights into economic life and its connection to the rest of society. In Tocqueville's Political Economy, Richard Swedberg shows that Tocqueville had a highly original and suggestive approach to economics--one that still has much to teach us today.
Through careful readings of Tocqueville's two major books and many of his other writings, Swedberg lays bare Tocqueville's ingenious way of thinking about major economic phenomena. At the center of Democracy in America, Tocqueville produced a magnificent analysis of the emerging entrepreneurial economy that he found during his 1831-32 visit to the United States. More than two decades later, in The Old Regime and the Revolution, Tocqueville made the complementary argument that it was France's blocked economy and society that led to the Revolution of 1789. In between the publication of these great works, Tocqueville also produced many lesser-known writings on such topics as property, consumption, and moral factors in economic life. When examined together, Swedberg argues, these books and other writings constitute an interesting alternative model of economic thinking, as well as a major contribution to political economy that deserves a place in contemporary discussions about the social effects of economics.

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Alexis de Tocqueville - Writings on Empire and Sla very (2000).jpg

After completing his research for Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville turned to the French consolidation of its empire in North Africa, which he believed deserving of similar attention. Tocqueville began studying Algerian history and culture, making two trips to Algeria in 1841 and 1846. He quickly became one of France's foremost experts on the country and wrote essays, articles, official letters, and parliamentary reports on such diverse topics as France's military and administrative policies in North Africa, the people of the Maghrib, his own travels in Algeria, and the practice of Islam. Throughout, Tocqueville consistently defended the French imperial project, a position that stands in tension with his admiration for the benefits of democracy he witnessed in America.

Although Tocqueville never published a book-length study of French North Africa, his various writings on the subject provide as invaluable a portrait of French imperialism as Democracy in America does of the Early Republic period in American history. In Writings on Empire and Slavery, Jennifer Pitts has selected and translated nine of his most important dispatches on Algeria, which offer startling new insights into both Tocqueville's political thought and French liberalism's attitudes toward the political, military, and moral aspects of France's colonial expansion. The volume also includes six articles Tocqueville wrote during the same period calling for the emancipation of slaves in France's Caribbean colonies.

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Harvey C. Mansfield - Tocqueville, A Very Short In troduction (2010).jpg

No one has ever described American democracy with more accurate insight or more profoundly than Alexis de Tocqueville. After meeting with Americans on extensive travels in the United States, and intense study of documents and authorities, he authored the landmark Democracy in America, publishing its two volumes in 1835 and 1840. Ever since, this book has been the best source for every serious attempt to understand America and democracy itself. Yet Tocqueville himself remains a mystery behind the elegance of his style.
Now one of our leading authorities on Tocqueville explains him in this splendid new entry in Oxford's acclaimed Very Short Introduction series. Harvey Mansfield addresses his subject as a thinker, clearly and incisively exploring Tocqueville's writings--not only his masterpiece, but also his secret Recollections, intended for posterity alone, and his unfinished work on his native France, The Old Regime and the Revolution. Tocqueville was a liberal, Mansfield writes, but not of the usual sort. The many elements of his life found expression in his thought: his aristocratic ancestry, his ventures in politics, his voyages abroad, his hopes and fears for America, and his disappointment with France. All his writings show a passion for political liberty and insistence on human greatness. Perhaps most important, he saw liberty not in theories, but in the practice of self-government in America. Ever an opponent of abstraction, he offered an analysis that forces us to consider what we actually do in our politics--suggesting that theory itself may be an enemy of freedom. And that, Mansfield writes, makes him a vitally important thinker for today.
Translator of an authoritative edition of Democracy in America, Harvey Mansfield here offers the fruit of decades of research and reflection in a clear, insightful, and marvelously compact introduction.

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M. R. R. Ossewaarde - Tocqueville's Political and Moral Thought, New Liberalism (2004).jpg

This book is an interpretation of Alexis de Tocqueville's moral and political thought and sheds new light on his ideas concerning the relationship between liberalism and democracy. This study is highly innovative as it portrays Tocqueville's liberalism as a synthesis between modern thought and Christian apology. Tocqueville remains an important figure sociology, politics, and philosophy, and the themes addressed in his work -- religion, the press, racism, the role of government -- are highly relevant today.This book discusses a wide range of Tocqueville's writings, including many that are unavailable or not readily available in English thus providing a new, much-needed understanding of the centrality of religion in Tocqueville's work.

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