Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editors' Note and Acknowledgments
- Interpretative Essay: The Third Democracy: Tocqueville's Views of America after 1840
- PART I LETTERS
- PART II SPEECHES, ARTICLES, AND DIPLOMATIC PAPERS
- General Introduction
- A America in the 1840s
- B America and the Revolution of 1848
- C Tocqueville's Contributions to the Debates on the Constitution of the Second Republic
- D The Poussin Affair
- E Final Thoughts on the American Constitution
- Appendix 1 Tocqueville's American Correspondents
- Appendix 2 Chronology
- Appendix 3 Sources for the Texts and Selected Bibliography
- Notes
- Index
A - America in the 1840s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editors' Note and Acknowledgments
- Interpretative Essay: The Third Democracy: Tocqueville's Views of America after 1840
- PART I LETTERS
- PART II SPEECHES, ARTICLES, AND DIPLOMATIC PAPERS
- General Introduction
- A America in the 1840s
- B America and the Revolution of 1848
- C Tocqueville's Contributions to the Debates on the Constitution of the Second Republic
- D The Poussin Affair
- E Final Thoughts on the American Constitution
- Appendix 1 Tocqueville's American Correspondents
- Appendix 2 Chronology
- Appendix 3 Sources for the Texts and Selected Bibliography
- Notes
- Index
Summary
General Introduction
In 1838, Tocqueville was elected a member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences; a year later, he was elected as a deputy to the Chamber of Deputies. In 1844, he became one of the proprietors of a newspaper published in Paris, Le Commerce. The two texts below reflect these different aspects of Tocqueville's political career. The first was written as a speech before the Chamber of Deputies, the second as a report to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. The importance Tocqueville attached to the latter is perhaps best judged by the fact that Tocqueville subsequently republished this text as an appendix to the twelfth French edition of Democracy in America (1848).
If Tocqueville's parliamentary career during the 1840s was something of a disappointment to him, on one subject at least he had an important impact. In 1844, he presented a report before parliament on prison reform. The context was one of a perceived increase in lawlessness and of growing fears of popular disorder. In presenting his report, Tocqueville drew extensively upon his earlier investigations in America and, in effect, restated the arguments both for and against the Philadelphia and Auburn systems, opting decisively for what he regarded as a meliorated and slightly relaxed version of the former. There is no need here to rehearse the detailed (and often heated) polemics that took place over this issue, but it was Tocqueville's view that the Philadelphia system of solitary confinement was the more effective and efficient of the two alternatives.
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- Tocqueville on America after 1840Letters and Other Writings, pp. 343 - 369Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009