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Alexis de Tocqueville. A Life

Alexis de Tocqueville. A Life

Publié le par Gabriel Marcoux-Chabot (Source : Yale University Press website)


Hugh BROGAN, Alexis de Tocqueville. A Life, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2007, 736 p.
ISBN 9780300108033
ISBN-10 0300108036


SUMMARY

Alexis de Tocqueville was one of the greatest political thinkers of alltime. Born a French aristocrat, he lost nearly his entire family in theReign of Terror, and he spent most of his adult life struggling forliberty under the unsuccessful regimes of nineteenth-century France. 

Atage twenty-five he travelled to America and encountered democracy forthe first time. This firsthand experience contributed to his incisivewriting on liberty and democracy. 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. This is a brilliant account of his life.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hugh Brogan held the R. A. Butler Chair in History at theUniversity of Essex and since retiring has had a research professorshipthere. His books include The Penguin History of the United States and biographies of J. F. Kennedy and Arthur Ransome.