Alexis de Tocqueville

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 spent most of his adult life struggling for liberty under the unsuccessful regimes of nineteenth-century France. He was a man of apparent contradictions: an aristocrat who believed in democracy, a conservative with liberal ideals, an agnostic with Christian faith in humanity. At age 25 he traveled to America and encountered democracy for the first time. This firsthand experience contributed to his incisive writing on liberty and democracy. His book 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. In the first full-length biography in English, historian Brogan puts the man and his ideas together for a fuller understanding of how his influential interpretations came into being.--From publisher description.

Prize history

• Orwell Prize for Political Writing

  2007

  Orwell Prize for Books, before the 2019 split.

  Shortlist