Alexis de Tocqueville
WARNING
You are viewing an older version of the Yalebooks website. Please visit out new website with more updated information and a better user experience: https://www.yalebooks.com
A Life
Hugh Brogan
View Inside
Format: PaperPrice: $20.00
Alexis de Tocqueville was one of the greatest political thinkers of all time. Born a French aristocrat, he lost nearly his entire family in the Reign of Terror, and he spent most of his adult life struggling for liberty under the unsuccessful regimes of nineteenth-century France.
At age twenty-five he travelled to America and encountered democracy for the first time. This firsthand experience contributed to his incisive writing on liberty and democracy. The ancien régime launched the scholarly study of the French Revolution, and Democracy in America remains the best book ever written by a European about the United States. This is a brilliant account of his life.
Click here for an extended question & answer discussion with the author.
"This is a magnificent biography. Hugh Brogan’s knowledge of the details of Tocqueville’s life is extraordinary, as is his erudite account of his family life and of French politics and society in the first half of the nineteenth century. And how splendidly the book is written! Tocqueville’s life was marked by a triumph of character; Hugh Brogan’s biography is a triumph of history and letters."—John Lukacs
“Brogan vividly captures the brilliance and complexity of Alexis de Tocqueville: prophet of modern democracy bound to the old regime by family and feeling; lover of liberty and the rule of law who felt the lure of empire; bold and restless spirit who recoiled from revolution. This is a vibrant and compelling biography.”—Alan Houston, University of California San Diego
“It might be thought that Tocqueville is by now a rather familiar figure, but he emerges anew from Brogan’s consummately skilful presentation as an intricate and in some ways contradictory personality. . . . It is hard to do justice to the artistry with which Brogan renders this complicated character. . . . Though I have read Tocqueville on and off over many years, I felt as if I knew the man behind the writings for the first time. Brogan has given us a masterly reconstruction of the European milieu by which Tocqueville was formed, and the definitive biography of one of the nineteenth century’s most representative thinkers.”—John Gray, Literary Review
“On switching off the light after reading War and Peace, Edmund Wilson, an American critic, would find his bedroom ‘full of people’. Something like that happens with this biography of Alexis de Toqueville. . . . Hugh Brogan has a historian’s grasp of the period and a novelist’s gift for character.”—The Economist (A 2006 Book of the Year)
“One of the delights of this remarkable biography is to . . . see the past as if it were the present. . . . A biography as humane, learned, humorous, and perceptive as this extends our understanding of ourselves and where we came from.”—Hilary Spurling, The Observer
"As timely as it is formidable. His biography ranks with Nicholas Boyle’s Goethe and David Cairns’s Berlioz as an outstanding example of the genre."—Nicholas Shakespeare, Daily Telegraph
"A wonderfully rich life in which action had been balanced by contemplation, reason by emotion, and to which this superb biography does full justice."—Tim Blanning, Sunday Telegraph
“This magisterial biography serves up all the interesting personal details in the life of Tocqueville, the man who most influenced America and its self-perception. But the heart of the book is Tocqueville’s travels in the United States and the writing of Democracy in America. . . . This is an engrossing and erudite account.”—Publishers Weekly
“The subject . . . receives the complete examination from British historian Brogan. His theme is Tocqueville’s intellectual distancing from his family’s political pedigree, which was landed, noble, and instinctually royalist, and Tocqueville’s diffident approach to the democratic trajectory of the age. . . . This biography is most significant for the way it integrates Tocqueville’s daily life with the development of his political thought.”—Booklist
Publication Date: April 1, 2008
16 b/w illus.
