Volume 51, Number 7 · April 29, 2004
Did Tocqueville 'Get' America?
By Garry Wills
Some people are astonished that a twenty-six-year-old Frenchman with imperfect English could write the best book on America, after a brief visit to the country. I am astonished that anyone can think that he did. Alexis de Tocqueville came to America with his friend, the twenty-nine-year-old Gustave de Beaumont, in 1830, ostensibly to make a report to the French government on penal reform in the United States. The two men carefully gathered statistics and testimony for their 440-page book on the subject (which consumed much of their time in America).[2] But when Tocqueville wrote his more sweeping analysis of American democracy, he gave no measurements of American incomes or the distribution of them, of American products or the things traded for them, of American currency or credit systems.[3]
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