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Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville

1805 CE1859 CE · Political Thinker · Paris

Alexis de Tocqueville was a French political thinker, historian, and statesman born in Paris in 1805 to an aristocratic Norman family. Trained in law, he served as a magistrate at Versailles before traveling to the United States in 1831–1832, ostensibly to study its prison system. The journey produced Democracy in America (1835, 1840), an analysis of equality, democratic society, and the tension between liberty and mass conformity. He later sat in the Chamber of Deputies and briefly served as foreign minister in 1849. His final major work, The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856), examined the roots of the French Revolution. He died at Cannes in 1859.

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