Tocqueville: Democracy in America

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) and his examination of the American democratic system. He wrote De La Democratie en Amerique in two parts, published in 1835 and 1840, when France was ruled by the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe. Tocqueville was interested in how aspects of American democracy, in the age of President Andrew Jackson, could be applied to Europe as it moved away from rule by monarchs and aristocrats. His work has been revisited by politicians ever since, particularly in America, with its analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of direct democracy and its warnings of mediocrity and the tyranny of the majority.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Robert Gildea 5 episodes
  Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford
• Susan-Mary Grant 3 episodes
  Professor of American History at Newcastle University
• Jeremy Jennings No other episodes
  Professor of Political Theory and Head of the School of Politics & Economics at King's College London

Reading list

• On the Penitentiary System in the United States and its Application to France: The Complete Text
  Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) Google Books →
• Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life
  Hugh Brogan (Yale University Press, 2008) Google Books →
• Alexis de Tocqueville: Prophet of Democracy in the Age of Revolution
  Hugh Brogan (Profile Books, 2006) Google Books →
• Tocqueville on America after 1840
  A. Craiutu & J.Jennings (eds) (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
• Tocqueville's Discovery of America
  Leo Damrosch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) Google Books →
• Tocqueville: A Biography
  Andre Jardin (Halban, 1988) Google Books →
• Tocqueville: The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty
  Lucien Jaume (Princeton University Press, 2013) Google Books →
• Alexis de Tocqueville
  Alan S. Kahan (Bloomsbury, 2013) Google Books →
• Tocqueville: A Very Short Introduction
  Harvey C. Mansfield (Oxford University Press, 2010) Google Books →
• Tocqueville in America
  George Wilson Pierson (Johns Hopkins, 1996) Google Books →
• The Chicago Companion to Tocqueville's Democracy in America
  James T. Schleifer (Chicago University Press, 2012) Google Books →
• The Making of Tocqueville's Democracy in America
  James T. Schleifer (Chapel Hill, 1980) Google Books →
• Tocqueville
  Larry Siedentop (Oxford University Press, 1994) Google Books →
• Democracy in America
  Alexis de Tocqueville (Penguin Books, 2003) Google Books →

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Programme ID: b09vyw0x

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09vyw0x

Auto-category: 320 (Political Science)