Tocqueville The Old Regime And The French Revolution

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  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: The Old Regime and the Revolution Alexis de Tocqueville, 1856
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume I Alexis de Tocqueville, 1998-08-15 The Old Regime and the Revolution is Alexis de Tocqueville's great meditation on the origins and meanings of the French Revolution. One of the most profound and influential studies of this pivotal event, it remains a relevant and stimulating discussion of the problem of preserving individual and political freedom in the modern world. Alan Kahan's translation provides a faithful, readable rendering of Tocqueville's last masterpiece, and includes notes and variants which reveal Tocqueville's sources and include excerpts from his drafts and revisions. The introduction by France's most eminent scholars of Tocqueville and the French Revolution, Françoise Mélonio and the late François Furet, provides a brilliant analysis of the work.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume I Alexis de Tocqueville, 1998 The Old Regime and the Revolution is Alexis de Tocqueville's great meditation on the origins and meanings of the French Revolution. One of the most profound and influential studies of this pivotal event, it remains a relevant and stimulating discussion of the problem of preserving individual and political freedom in the modern world. Alan Kahan's translation provides a faithful, readable rendering of Tocqueville's last masterpiece, and includes notes and variants which reveal Tocqueville's sources and include excerpts from his drafts and revisions. The introduction by France's most eminent scholars of Tocqueville and the French Revolution, Françoise Mélonio and the late François Furet, provides a brilliant analysis of the work.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: The Old Regime and the French Revolution Alexis de Tocqueville, 2010 This1856 volume constitutes one of the most important books ever written about the French Revolution. It explores the rebellion's origins and consequences, offering timeless insights into the pursuit of individual and political freedom.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: The Old Regime and the Revolution Alexis De Tocqueville, 1998
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: The Old Régime and the French Revolution Alexis de Tocqueville, 1978
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: Tocqueville Unveiled Robert T. Gannett, 2003-09-15 Drawing on his unprecendented access to Tocqueville's papers, Robert T. Gannett Jr reveals the ingenuity of Tocqueville's analyses of issues such as landownership, administrative centralization, and public opinion in pre-reolutionary France.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: Tocqueville and Beyond Robert M. Schwartz, Robert Alan Schneider, 2003 This collection of essays by French and American historians testifies to the enduring importance of Alexis de Tocqueville's The Old Regime and the French Revolution, first published in 1856. Highly original in its day and now recognized as a classic, The Old Regime has since the 1970s stimulated considerable research and improved our understanding of the French Old Regime. Tocqueville and Beyond joins this trend to offer both an appreciation and critique of Tocqueville's remarkable book. From the wide-ranging perspectives of privileged nobles, men of letters, rural life, and the evolution of centralization and liberty in France as well as the Dutch Republic, these essays attest to the continuing significance of Tocqueville's classic study.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: The Old Regime and the Revolution Alexis De Tocqueville, 1998
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: Recollections Alexis de Tocqueville, 2016-12-14 Alexis de Tocqueville’s Souvenirs was his extraordinarily lucid and trenchant analysis of the 1848 revolution in France. Despite its bravura passages and stylistic flourishes, however, it was not intended for publication. Written just before Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s 1851 coup prompted the great theorist of democracy to retire from political life, it was initially conceived simply as an exercise in candid personal reflection. In Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848 and Its Aftermath, renowned historian Olivier Zunz and award-winning translator Arthur Goldhammer offer an entirely new translation of Tocqueville’s compelling book. The book has an interesting publishing history. Yielding to pressure from friends, Tocqueville finally approved its publication, although only after those portrayed in the work—most, unflatteringly—had died. After Tocqueville’s death, his grandnephew published a redacted version, but it was not until 1942 that French editors restored the potentially offensive passages. Goldhammer’s is the first English translation to do justice to Tocqueville’s original uncensored masterpiece of analytical description, stylistic subtlety, vivid social panorama, and incisive critique of political blundering and cowardice. Zunz’s introduction—and his addition of several of Tocqueville’s ancillary speeches, occasional texts, and letters—round out a unique volume that significantly enhances our understanding of the revolutionary period and Tocqueville’s role in it. In this new edition, Zunz highlights the persistent influence of the United States on the life and work of a man who tirelessly, albeit futilely, promoted the American model of government for the New French Republic.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: Tocqueville and the French Françoise Mélonio, 1998 With his lifelong examination of the relation between freedom and equality in modern societies, Alexis de Tocqueville is the most widely shared icon of Franco-American political culure. Until now, his American readers have not been in a position to recognize the extent to which, even when his ostensible subject was America, Tocqueville was engaging in hotly contested debates about French society and politics. Francoise Melonio's Tocqueville and the French allows for a clearer understanding of Tocqueville's writings by supplying their missing French context, from the time he wrote Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the French Revolution to the present. With its contextualization and interpretation of his workds Tocqueville and the French will compel the attention of historians, sociologists, political scientists, and concerned citizens for whom Tocqueville remains perhaps the single most important interpreter of American society and culture.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: The French Idea of Freedom Dale Van Kley, 1995-04-01 “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789” is the French Revolution’s best known utterance. By 1789, to be sure, England looked proudly back to the Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, and a bill of rights, and even the young American Declaration of Independence and the individual states’ various declarations and bills of rights preceded the French Declaration. But the French deputies of the National Assembly tried hard, in the words of one of their number, not to receive lessons from others but rather “to give them” to the rest of the world, to proclaim not the rights of Frenchmen, but those “for all times and nations.” The chapters in this book treat mainly the origins of the Declaration in the political thought and practice of the preceding three centuries that Tocqueville designated the “Old Regime.” Among the topics covered are privileged corporations; the events of the three months preceding the Declaration; blacks, Jews, and women; the Assembly’s debates on the Declaration; the influence of sixteenth-century notions of sovereignty and the separation of powers; the rights of the accused in legal practices and political trials from 1716 to 1789; the natural rights to freedom of religion; and the monarchy’s “feudal” exploitation of the royal domain.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: Feudalism, venality, and revolution Stephen Miller, 2020-10-27 According to Alexis de Tocqueville’s influential work on the Old Regime and the French Revolution, royal centralisation had so weakened the feudal power of the nobles that their remaining privileges became glaringly intolerable to commoners. This book challenges the theory by showing that when Louis XVI convened assemblies of landowners in the late 1770s and 1780s to discuss policies needed to resolve the budgetary crisis, he faced widespread opposition from lords and office holders. These elites regarded the assemblies as a challenge to their hereditary power over commoners. The king’s government comprised seigneurial jurisdictions and venal offices. Lordships and offices upheld inequality on behalf of the nobility and bred the discontent motivating the people to make the French Revolution.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: France Before 1789 Jon Elster, 2022-12-13 France before 1789 presents the main features of the prodigiously complex social system of the ancien regime which proceeded the French Revolution. In doing so Jon Elster goes beyond formal institutions to show how they worked in practice. He draws on a host of examples and contemporary texts to illuminate the perverse and sometimes pathological effects of this system and seeks to provide a detailed analysis of the political institutions that undergirded it. Whereas Tocqueville, in his famous analysis of the ancient regime, wanted to understand the old regime as a prelude to revolution, Elster views it as a prelude to constitution-making prompted by and intended to resolve these perversities. He views these as overlapping, yet important enough to render distinct. In addition to defending a particular set of substantive propositions about the conditions which led to the Constituent Assembly, Elster argues for a specific methodological approach to history, which emphasizes supplementing the historian's craft with approaches from the social sciences. Ultimately, he does not claim to answer the historians' questions better than they do. But he does aspire to ask and sometimes answer questions that historians have not formulated in order to better understand one of the most significant examples of collective decision-making history offers us--
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: The Coming of the French Revolution Georges Lefebvre, 2019-12-31 The classic book that restored the voices of ordinary people to our understanding of the French Revolution The Coming of the French Revolution remains essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of this great turning point in the formation of the modern world. First published in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War and suppressed by the Vichy government, this classic work explains what happened in France in 1789, the first year of the French Revolution. Georges Lefebvre wrote history “from below”—a Marxist approach—and in this book he places the peasantry at the center of his analysis, emphasizing the class struggles in France and the significant role they played in the coming of the revolution. Eloquently translated by the historian R. R. Palmer and featuring an introduction by Timothy Tackett that provides a concise intellectual biography of Lefebvre and a critical appraisal of the book, this Princeton Classics edition offers perennial insights into democracy, dictatorship, and insurrection.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: Tocqueville in the Ottoman Empire Ariel Salzmann, 2004 Based on archival research, this work examines the Ottoman ancien regime. The author argues that the success of the regime was due to the articulation of a complex financial network revolving around central state elite investments and an Istanbul-based and supervised banking system.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: Tocqueville Andre Jardin, 1989-11 In the first full-scale biography of Tocqueville after his death. Andre Jardin condensed the vast array of information on this intriguing figure into an indispensable resource. Tocqueville: A Biography provides an insightful account that explores the complex factors that shaped Tocqueville's writing, opinions, political career, and personal life. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: Tocqueville between Two Worlds Sheldon S. Wolin, 2009-02-09 Alexis de Tocqueville may be the most influential political thinker in American history. He also led an unusually active and ambitious career in French politics. In this magisterial book, one of America's most important contemporary theorists draws on decades of research and thought to present the first work that fully connects Tocqueville's political and theoretical lives. In doing so, Sheldon Wolin presents sweeping new interpretations of Tocqueville's major works and of his place in intellectual history. As he traces the origins and impact of Tocqueville's ideas, Wolin also offers a profound commentary on the general trajectory of Western political life over the past two hundred years. Wolin proceeds by examining Tocqueville's key writings in light of his experiences in the troubled world of French politics. He portrays Democracy in America, for example, as a theory of discovery that emerged from Tocqueville's contrasting experiences of America and of France's constitutional monarchy. He shows us how Tocqueville used Recollections to reexamine his political commitments in light of the revolutions of 1848 and the threat of socialism. He portrays The Old Regime and the French Revolution as a work of theoretical history designed to throw light on the Bonapartist despotism he saw around him. Throughout, Wolin highlights the tensions between Tocqueville's ideas and his activities as a politician, arguing that--despite his limited political success--Tocqueville was ''perhaps the last influential theorist who can be said to have truly cared about political life.'' In the course of the book, Wolin also shows that Tocqueville struggled with many of the forces that constrain politics today, including the relentless advance of capitalism, of science and technology, and of state bureaucracy. He concludes that Tocqueville's insights and anxieties about the impotence of politics in a ''postaristocratic'' era speak directly to the challenges of our own ''postdemocratic'' age. A monumental new study of Tocqueville, this is also a rich and provocative work about the past, the present, and the future of democratic life in America and abroad.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: The Terror of Natural Right Dan Edelstein, 2009-10-15 Natural right—the idea that there is a collection of laws and rights based not on custom or belief but that are “natural” in origin—is typically associated with liberal politics and freedom. In The Terror of Natural Right, Dan Edelstein argues that the revolutionaries used the natural right concept of the “enemy of the human race”—an individual who has transgressed the laws of nature and must be executed without judicial formalities—to authorize three-quarters of the deaths during the Terror. Edelstein further contends that the Jacobins shared a political philosophy that he calls “natural republicanism,” which assumed that the natural state of society was a republic and that natural right provided its only acceptable laws. Ultimately, he proves that what we call the Terror was in fact only one facet of the republican theory that prevailed from Louis’s trial until the fall of Robespierre. A highly original work of historical analysis, political theory, literary criticism, and intellectual history, The Terror of Natural Right challenges prevailing assumptions of the Terror to offer a new perspective on the Revolutionary period.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution Timothy Tackett, 2015-02-23 Between 1793 and 1794, thousands of French citizens were imprisoned and hundreds sent to the guillotine by a powerful dictatorship that claimed to be acting in the public interest. Only a few years earlier, revolutionaries had proclaimed a new era of tolerance, equal justice, and human rights. How and why did the French Revolution’s lofty ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity descend into violence and terror? “By attending to the role of emotions in propelling the Terror, Tackett steers a more nuanced course than many previous historians have managed...Imagined terrors, as...Tackett very usefully reminds us, can have even more political potency than real ones.” —David A. Bell, The Atlantic “[Tackett] analyzes the mentalité of those who became ‘terrorists’ in 18th-century France...In emphasizing weakness and uncertainty instead of fanatical strength as the driving force behind the Terror...Tackett...contributes to an important realignment in the study of French history.” —Ruth Scurr, The Spectator “[A] boldly conceived and important book...This is a thought-provoking book that makes a major contribution to our understanding of terror and political intolerance, and also to the history of emotions more generally. It helps expose the complexity of a revolution that cannot be adequately understood in terms of principles alone.” —Alan Forrest, Times Literary Supplement
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction William Doyle, 2001-08-23 Beginning with a discussion of familiar images of the French Revolution, this work looks at how the ancien régime became ancien as well as examining cases in which achievement failed to match ambition.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: Tocqueville Harvey Mansfield, 2010-06-24 A study of the thought and works of Alexis de Tocqueville written by one of the premier political scientists of our time. Exploring his observations of contemporary democratic politics and his predictions for the triumph and pitfalls of democracy in the future, the volume features the new liberalism of Tocqueville's masterpiece, Democracy in America.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume II Alexis de Tocqueville, 2001-09-01 With his monumental work The Old Regime and the Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)-best known for his classic Democracy in America— envisioned a multivolume philosophic study of the origins of modern France that would examine the implications of French history on the nature and development of democratic society. Volume 1, which covered the eighteenth-century background to the Revolution, was published to great acclaim in 1856. On the continuation of this project, he wrote: When this Revolution has finished its work, [this volume] will show what that work really was, and what the new society which has come from that violent labor is, what the Revolution has taken away and what it has preserved from that old regime against which it was directed. Tocqueville died in the midst of this work. Here in volume 2—in clear, up-to-date English—is all that he had completed, including the chapters he started for a work on Napoleon, notes and analyses he made in the course of researching and writing the first volume, and his notes on his preparation for his continuation. Based on the new French edition of The Old Regime, most of the translated texts have never before appeared in English, and many of those that have appeared have been considerable altered. More than ever before, readers will be able to see how Tocqueville's account of the Revolution would have come out, had he lived to finish it. This handsomely produced volume completes the set and is essential reading for anyone interested in the French Revolution or in Tocqueville's thought.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: "The European Revolution" & Correspondence with Gobineau Alexis de Tocqueville, 1974
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume I Alexis de Tocqueville, 1998-08-15 The Old Regime and the Revolution is Alexis de Tocqueville's great meditation on the origins and meanings of the French Revolution. One of the most profound and influential studies of this pivotal event, it remains a relevant and stimulating discussion of the problem of preserving individual and political freedom in the modern world. Alan Kahan's translation provides a faithful, readable rendering of Tocqueville's last masterpiece, and includes notes and variants which reveal Tocqueville's sources and include excerpts from his drafts and revisions. The introduction by France's most eminent scholars of Tocqueville and the French Revolution, Françoise Mélonio and the late François Furet, provides a brilliant analysis of the work.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity Ferenc Fehér, 2023-11-10 Written from widely different perspectives, these essays characterize the Great Revolution as the dawn of the modern age, the grand narrative of modernity. The scope of issues under scrutiny is extremely broad, ranging from the analyses of the hotly debated class character of 1789 and the problem of the nation state to the “Cult of the Supreme Being,” the emancipation of the Jews, and the cultural heritage of the Revolution. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: Interpreting the French Revolution François Furet, 1981-09-24 The author applies the philosophies of Alexis de Tocqueville and Augustin Cochin to both historical and contemporary explanations of the French Revolution.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution , 2003 [This book] gives readers [an] introduction to the French Revolution that is also grounded in the latest ... scholarship ... The book presents a succinct narrative of the Revolution.-Back cover. [In this book, the authors] follow a wide range of events, including the social and cultural events as well as the military and political ones. Women's history and gender relations ... have been integrated into the general story.-Pref.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: Tocqueville and Old Regime Richard Herr, 2015-12-08 Professor Herr's brief and attractively presented Tocqueville and the Old Regime is to be commended to all who are interested in Tocqueville and his great hook on The Ancien Regime and the Revolution Originally published in 1962. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: Origins of the French Revolution William Doyle, 1999 The revised and updated 3rd edition of the Origins of the French Revolution emphasises the Revolution's social & economic origins & critically appraises the results of a new generation of research findings and interpretation.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: The Ancien Régime and the Revolution Alexis de Tocqueville, 2008-05-29 The Ancien Régime and the Revolution is a comparison of revolutionary France and the despotic rule it toppled. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) is an objective observer of both periods – providing a merciless critique of the ancien régime: with its venality: oppression and inequality: yet acknowledging the reforms introduced under Louis XVI: and claiming that the post-Revolution state was in many ways as tyrannical as that of the King; its once lofty and egalitarian ideals corrupted and forgotten. Writing in the 1850s: Tocqueville wished to expose the return to despotism he witnessed in his own time under Napoleon III: by illuminating the grand: but ultimately doomed: call to liberty made by the French people in 1789. His eloquent and instructive study raises questions about liberty: nationalism and justice that remain urgent today.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: Ancien Regime and the Revolution Alexis de Tocqueville, 2008-05-29 The Ancien Régime and the Revolution is a comparison of revolutionary France and the despotic rule it toppled. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) is an objective observer of both periods – providing a merciless critique of the ancien régime, with its venality, oppression and inequality, yet acknowledging the reforms introduced under Louis XVI, and claiming that the post-Revolution state was in many ways as tyrannical as that of the King; its once lofty and egalitarian ideals corrupted and forgotten. Writing in the 1850s, Tocqueville wished to expose the return to despotism he witnessed in his own time under Napoleon III, by illuminating the grand, but ultimately doomed, call to liberty made by the French people in 1789. His eloquent and instructive study raises questions about liberty, nationalism and justice that remain urgent today.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: From Deficit to Deluge Dale Van Kley, 2011 Seven authorities in their respective fields come together to offer a new interpretation of the French Revolution: they show how the French monarchy's clumsy efforts to solve a fiscal crisis politicized long-standing structural problems, metastasizing an apparently fairly normal fiscal crisis into a revolution.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: Alexis de Tocqueville Alan S. Kahan, 2009-11-19 Alexis de Tocqueville was the author of two masterpieces, Democracry in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution. In this volume, Alan S. Kahan, one of the world's leading authorities on Tocqueville's work, presents an accessible and rigorous account of the French author's ideas set in the context of his life and times. It sets out the essential tensions and ambiguities in Tocqueville's thought and analyzes the idea that made him such a compelling and insightful thinker.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume II Alexis de Tocqueville, 2016-02-24 With his monumental work The Old Regime and the Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)-best known for his classic Democracy in America— envisioned a multivolume philosophic study of the origins of modern France that would examine the implications of French history on the nature and development of democratic society. Volume 1, which covered the eighteenth-century background to the Revolution, was published to great acclaim in 1856. On the continuation of this project, he wrote: When this Revolution has finished its work, [this volume] will show what that work really was, and what the new society which has come from that violent labor is, what the Revolution has taken away and what it has preserved from that old regime against which it was directed. Tocqueville died in the midst of this work. Here in volume 2—in clear, up-to-date English—is all that he had completed, including the chapters he started for a work on Napoleon, notes and analyses he made in the course of researching and writing the first volume, and his notes on his preparation for his continuation. Based on the new French edition of The Old Regime, most of the translated texts have never before appeared in English, and many of those that have appeared have been considerable altered. More than ever before, readers will be able to see how Tocqueville's account of the Revolution would have come out, had he lived to finish it. This handsomely produced volume completes the set and is essential reading for anyone interested in the French Revolution or in Tocqueville's thought.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution Joan B. Landes, 1988 In this provocative interdisciplinary essay, Joan B. Landes examines the impact on women of the emergence of a new, bourgeois organization of public life in the eighteenth century. She focuses on France, contrasting the role and representation of women under the Old Regime with their status during and after the Revolution. Basing her work on a wide reading of current historical scholarship, Landes draws on the work of Habermas and his followers, as well as on recent theories of representation, to re-create public-sphere theory from a feminist point of view.Within the extremely personal and patriarchal political culture of Old Regime France, elite women wielded surprising influence and power, both in the court and in salons. Urban women of the artisanal class often worked side by side with men and participated in many public functions. But the Revolution, Landes asserts, relegated women to the home, and created a rigidly gendered, essentially male, bourgeois public sphere. The formal adoption of universal rights actually silenced public women by emphasizing bourgeois conceptions of domestic virtue.In the first part of this book, Landes links the change in women's roles to a shift in systems of cultural representation. Under the absolute monarchy of the Old Regime, political culture was represented by the personalized iconic imagery of the father/king. This imagery gave way in bourgeois thought to a more symbolic system of representation based on speech, writing, and the law. Landes traces this change through the art and writing of the period. Using the works of Rousseau and Montesquieu as examples of the passage to the bourgeois theory of the public sphere, she shows how such concepts as universal reason, law, and nature were rooted in an ideologically sanctioned order of gender difference and separate public and private spheres. In the second part of the book, Landes discusses the discourses on women's rights and on women in society authored by Condorcet, Wollstonecraft, Gouges, Tristan, and Comte within the context of these new definitions of the public sphere. Focusing on the period after the execution of the king, she asks who got to be included as the People when men and women demanded that liberal and republican principles be carried to their logical conclusion. She examines women's roles in the revolutionary process and relates the birth of modern feminism to the silencing of the politically influential women of the Old Regime court and salon and to women's expulsion from public participation during and after the Revolution.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville Alexis de Tocqueville, 2018-04-04 Reproduction of the original: The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville by Alexis de Tocqueville
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy Pierre Manent, 1996 One of France's leading and most controversial political thinkers explores the central themes of Tocqueville's writings: the democratic revolution and the modern passion for equality. What becomes of people when they are overcome by this passion and how does it transform the contents of life? Pierre Manent's analysis concludes that the growth of state power and the homogenization of society are two primary consequences of equalizing conditions. The author shows the contemporary relevance of Tocqueville's teaching: to love democracy well, one must love it moderately. Manent examines the prophetic nature of Tocqueville's writings with breadth, clarity, and depth. His findings are both timely and highly relevant as people in Eastern Europe and around the world are grappling with the fragile, complicated, and frequently contradictory nature of democracy. This book is essential reading for students and scholars of political theory and political philosophy, as well as general readers interested in the nature of modern democracy.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: The Ancien Regime and the Revolution Alexis De Tocqueville, 2019-06-17 First published in French in 1856, French diplomat and political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville's The Old Regime and the French Revolution is one of the most influential treatises written on the French Revolution. Tocqueville begins by tracing the causes of the French Revolution to the structure of society of France prior to the Revolution, what he terms the Ancien Regime. Tocqueville rejected the notion that the Revolution was a radical transformation of French society. He instead suggests his theory of continuity, specifically that the Revolution was not an attempt to change the nature of society in a truly fundamental way, but to wrest control from the ancient, feudal landed aristocracy and replace those outdated institutions with a representative democracy. He makes the important observation that the government of Napoleon was autocratic, strongly centralized, and thus not much different from the Ancien Regime. Tocqueville was a fierce proponent of social institutions based on freedom and equality rather than on the rigid social hierarchy of the feudal social system of the Middle Ages, a system that was increasingly untenable in the age of enlightenment. Tocqueville's treatise remains a timely and important work on social class, revolution, and democracy. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper and follows the translation of John Bonner.
  tocqueville the old regime and the french revolution: Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution Madame de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine), 1818
Alexis de Tocqueville - Wikipedia
Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville[a] (29 July 1805 – 16 April 1859), [7] was a French aristocrat, …

Tocqueville Society - United Way of San Antonio and Bexa…
The Tocqueville Society is open to individuals who contribute $10,000 or more annually to United Way of San …

Alexis de Tocqueville - Democracy in America, Summ…
Nov 9, 2009 · Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) was a French sociologist and political theorist who traveled to …

Alexis de Tocqueville | French Historian, Political Writer & S…
Apr 12, 2025 · Alexis de Tocqueville (born July 29, 1805, Paris, France—died April 16, 1859, Cannes) was a …

Tocqueville Society | United Way Worldwide
The Society celebrates philanthropic leaders and volunteer champions from around the world who devote their …

Alexis de Tocqueville - Wikipedia
Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville[a] (29 July 1805 – 16 April 1859), [7] was a French aristocrat, diplomat, political philosopher, and historian. He is best known for his works …

Tocqueville Society - United Way of San Antonio and Bexar County
The Tocqueville Society is open to individuals who contribute $10,000 or more annually to United Way of San Antonio and Bexar County. Donors also have the opportunity to step-up to …

Alexis de Tocqueville - Democracy in America, Summary & Beliefs - HISTORY
Nov 9, 2009 · Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) was a French sociologist and political theorist who traveled to the United States to study its prisons and wrote “Democracy in America” …

Alexis de Tocqueville | French Historian, Political Writer & Social ...
Apr 12, 2025 · Alexis de Tocqueville (born July 29, 1805, Paris, France—died April 16, 1859, Cannes) was a political scientist, historian, and politician, best known for Democracy in …

Tocqueville Society | United Way Worldwide
The Society celebrates philanthropic leaders and volunteer champions from around the world who devote their time, talents and resources to solving our communities’ most pressing challenges. …

Democracy in America: Alexis de Tocqueville's Introduction
Mar 6, 2012 · Alexis de Tocqueville’s official purpose was to study the American penal system, but his real interest was America herself. He spent nine months criss-crossing the young country, …

Tocqueville legacy – Tocqueville
In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville embarked on a journey to the United States, officially to study the American prison system. What he discovered went far beyond: his observations became the …

Introduction to the work of Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) was a French political philosopher, statesman, and author of two seminal works in the history of political thought, Democracy in America and The Old …

The Tyranny of Fragility
Jan 13, 2025 · Tocqueville’s writings illuminate a deep paradox arising from modern forms of democracy—as is evident in common misconceptions of his critique of the tyranny of the majority.

Alexis de Tocqueville summary | Britannica
Alexis de Tocqueville, (born July 29, 1805, Paris, France—died April 16, 1859, Cannes), French political scientist, historian, and politician.