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INFLUENCES ON AND ORIGINS OF TOCQUEVILLE'S THOUGHT

I came into the world at the end of a long Revolution, which, after having destroyed the old state, had created nothing durable.

Aristocracy was already dead when I started life and democracy did not yet exist, so my instinct could lead me blindly

neither toward one nor toward the other.

Alexis de Tocqueville to Henry Reeve (Mar. 22, 1837),

Selected Letters on Politics and Society 115, 115-16 (Roger Boesche ed., James Toupin & Roger Boesche trans., University of California Press 1985).

Last updated 12/06/2011

See also Resources on Alexis de Tocqueville and Resources on the Doctrinaires

Craiutu, Aurelian, Tocqueville and the Political Thought of the Doctrinaires, 20(3) History of Political Thought 457 (Autumn 1999).

Guicciardi, Jean Pierre, Tocqueville et les Lumières, in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 203-219 (Theodore Besterman ed.; Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1976).

Hand, Jonathan Bradford, Tocqueville’s “New Political Science”: A Critical Assessment of Montesquieu’s Vision of a Liberal Modernity (Dissertation, University of Chicago, 2002).

In Search of Tocqueville's Democracy in America: Website (lists documents)

Maguire, Matthew William, The Conversion of Enlightenment (Dissertation, Harvard University, 1999).

Maguire, Matthew William, The Conversion of Imagination: From Pascal Through Rousseau to Tocqueville (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). Based on the author’s dissertation.

McWilliams, Susan Jane, Stranger Wisdom: Travel and the Origins of Political Knowledge (Dissertation, Princeton University, 2006).

Nemoianu, Virgil Martin, Blaise Pascal on Skepticism and Order (Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2002).

Rahe, Paul Anthony, Soft Depotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

Since June 27, 2006