ABSTRACT
Tocqueville is best-known for his monumental two-volume treatise on the United States, published in French as De la democratie en Amerique, and almost simultaneously in English translation. The German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, in exile in Paris, found it difficult to warm to Alexis de Tocqueville. Benjamin Constant and Madame de Stael, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer come to mind; but even these examples don't really parallel the extraordinarily intimate intellectual friendship between Tocqueville and Beaumont. Tocqueville and Beaumont were intellectual equals; only history and circumstance have occluded Beaumont's very real intellectual eminence. Much as Tocqueville had pointed unerringly to central and unique aspects of American social and political culture, Beaumont gave a thoroughgoing and vividly written diagnosis of the Irish disease. Arguing in favour of liberal ideas and institutions, Beaumont was indeed the first public sociologist and intellectual who actually looked critically into the neglected dark side of struggle for liberal democracy.
