Tocqueville and the French

With his lifelong examination of the relation between freedom and equality in modern societies, Alexis de Tocqueville is the most widely shared icon of Franco-American political culure. Until now, his American readers have not been in a position to recognize the extent to which, even when his ostensible subject was America, Tocqueville was engaging in hotly contested debates about French society and politics.

Francoise Melonio's Tocqueville and the French allows for a clearer understanding of Tocqueville's writings by supplying their missing French context, from the time he wrote Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the French Revolution to the present. With its contextualization and interpretation of his workds Tocqueville and the French will compel the attention of historians, sociologists, political scientists, and concerned citizens for whom Tocqueville remains perhaps the single most important interpreter of American society and culture.

Francoise Melonio is Professor of French Literature at the University of Nanterre in Paris and teaches the history of ideas at the Ecole des Hautes en Sciences Sociales. Beth G. Raps is a freelance translator living in Tallahassee, Florida. Seymour Drescher is University Professor of History and Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.