5 - Tocqueville’s Democracy in America Reconsidered

Summary

INTRODUCTION

This chapter focuses on Democracy in America, certainly the most famous - and probably the most important - of the works of Alexis de Tocqueville. It is an effort on my part to re-examine and to rethink the making of Tocqueville's classic book, based upon my work over the past five years as translator of the forthcoming English language version of Eduardo Nolla's critical edition of the Democracy. In 1990, this invaluable contribution to Tocqueville studies was published first in a Spanish translation and then in the original French. The Nolla work was the first, and remains by far the fullest, critical edition of Tocqueville's Democracy. It presents a very broad and extensive selection of early outlines, drafts, manuscript variants, marginalia, unpublished fragments, and other materials relating to the writing of Tocqueville's book. These working papers are largely drawn from the Yale Tocqueville Manuscripts Collection, which is housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale University and contains, among other treasures, Tocqueville's original working manuscript for the Democracy and large quantities of his drafts. Included in the apparatus of the Nolla critical edition are editorial notes, a selection of important appendices, excerpts from and/or cross-references to Tocqueville's travel notebooks, his correspondence, and his printed sources, as well as significant excerpts from the critical commentary of family and friends, written in response to their readings of Tocqueville's manuscript.