ABSTRACT
Alexis de Tocqueville was born in Paris in 1805, the third son of an aristocratic French couple. Tocqueville decided to study the American system at first hand, wanting to understand how the Americans had made their democracy work. Tocqueville went on to a career as a politician and historian. And his ideas still stimulate political debate, particularly in America, where his influence has been most noticeable and lasting. Local societies played an important role in a working democracy, Tocqueville noted. Americans from all walks of life and of all ages regularly came together to form groups-something that did not happen in the Europe of the 1830s. When the first volume of Democracy In America was published in 1835, it introduced a new way of thinking about democracy. Although some authors before Tocqueville had argued that democracy was dangerous, that was not because they thought it would lead to conformity and minority views being heard less.
