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The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville
Maybe someday
32
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
58/100Critics
7/100Scholars
Author:
Olivier Zunz
Publisher:
Princeton University Press
Date:
May 3, 2022
In 1831, at the age of 25, Alexis de Tocqueville made his fateful journey to America, where he observed the thrilling reality of a functioning democracy. From that moment onward, the French aristocrat would dedicate his life as a writer and politician to ending despotism in his country and bringing it into a new age. In this biography, Olivier Zunz tells the story of a radical thinker who, uniquely charged by the events of his time, both in America and France, used the world as a laboratory for his political ideas.
What The Reviewers Say
Informative.
Olivier Zunz offers many details...and wastes none of them.
An exhaustively researched and discretely focused biography of the great Frenchman.
... sets an off-puttingly narrow framing for a book billing itself as a full-dress biography.
