Difference between revisions of "Alexis de Tocqueville"
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Revision as of 22:30, April 21, 2007
Alexis Clérel de Tocqueville (1805-1859) was a French historian who published an insightful review of the United States entitled Democracy in America (1835), based on a nine month tour of the young country. It remains the most comprehensive treatise of American society to this day.
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:[1]
- Upon my arrival in the United States the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention .... In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united.
De Tocqueville further wrote:
- The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other .... They brought with them into the New World a form of Christianity which I cannot better describe than by styling it a democratic and republican religion.
He published a second volume of Democracy in America in 1840, in which he described:
- Christianity has therefore retained a strong hold on the public mind in America ... In the United States ... Christianity itself is a fact so irresistibly established, that no one undertakes either to attack or to defend it.
Writings
- Democracy in America
- Souvenirs
- The Old Regime and the Revolution