ABSTRACT
Alexis de Tocqueville saw America a good while before its meridian: in Emerson's scarring phrase he saw it at "the cockcrowing and the morning star." He described it, in his Democracy in America, with a reflective passion whose obsessiveness had less to do with the state of America itself than with his inner drive to discover the solution of the problems posed by the Western democratic revolutions, and the relevance of that solution to the problems of France. His luck—and ours—was that when he made his voyage to Jacksonian America in 1831 he came to the right place, at the right time, with the right questions, and the right preparation to see the bearing of the American experience on them. The result was not only the greatest book ever written on America, but probably the greatest on any national polity and culture.
