Quotes by Alexis de Tocqueville
1805 – 1859
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) was an enormously influential French political philosopher, politician, and historian. After a trip to the U.S. in 1831 to observe the penal system he wrote Democracy in America (1835).
Bio
He served as a member of parliament in the July Monarchy and the 1848 Revolution, writing an important memoir about the events of that upheaval. His last major work was a unfinished history of The Ancien Régime and the Revolution (1856).
See also our collection of extracts, essays, and other resources on Tocqueville.
See the Liberty Matters online discussion on Tocqueville’s New Science of Politics Revisited
Tocqueville featured as the July 2023 OLL Birthday. Read it here
Socialism & Interventionism
Alexis de Tocqueville stood up in the Constituent Assembly to criticize socialism as a violation of human nature, property rights, and individual liberty (1848)
Presidents, Kings, Tyrants, & Despots
Tocqueville on the form of despotism the government would assume in democratic America (1840)
Politics & Liberty
Tocqueville on the spirit of association (1835)
Presidents, Kings, Tyrants, & Despots
Tocqueville on the “New Despotism” (1837)
Revolution
Tocqueville on the 1848 Revolution in Paris (1851)
Liberty
Tocqueville on the true love of liberty (1856)
The State
Tocqueville on the absence of government in America (1835)
Politics & Liberty
Tocqueville on centralization as the natural form of government for democracies (1835)
Colonies, Slavery & Abolition
Tocqueville on Centralised Government in Canada and Decentralised Government in America (1856)
The State
Tocqueville warns how administrative despotism might come to a democracy like America (1840)