Introduction

Summary

In the editor’s introduction, Richard Boyd surveys the main intellectual sources for Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic work Democracy in America. After sketching out how Democracy in America has been read in light of the influences of Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Blaise Pascal, and François Guizot, Boyd surveys the book’s contemporaneous receptions in France, England, and America. Consulting reviews from leading journals of the 1830s and 1840s, Boyd demonstrates that, while Democracy in America was universally acclaimed as a work of genius, its teachings about democracy were interpreted differently as a function of the ideological predilections of its readers. Tocqueville’s appeal to divergent political sensibilities – conservative and liberal democratic alike – anticipates a consistent pattern of subsequent thinkers adapting the book’s complex teachings to their own political circumstances. This rich tradition of appropriation is hardly confined to the United States or Europe but extends globally into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.