ABSTRACT
Tocqueville came at a good time for a social observer. The Jacksonian era was one of the watersheds of American history, when the driblets of small changes are gathered into a strong of great change which conditions what is to come for some time. Tocqueville got the help of a young American in digesting some of these formidable sources. But otherwise he relied on his memories and reflections and his incomparable notebooks. The notebooks are worth intensive study; they show how a first-rate mind went at making a first-rate book. One may ask whether Tocqueville’s method was inductive or deductive, but it is like asking which of a pair of scissors does the cutting. What was striking about Tocqueville was not the preconceptions which could distort the picture, but the striking capacity to move out of the domain of his own background and experience and enter that of the people he talked with.
