A French aristocrat who came to Jacksonian America ostensibly to study its prisons and wrote, instead, one of the most perceptive books ever composed about any society. Democracy in America (1835/1840) asks what it means when the great leveling tide of equality — which he considered providential and irreversible — meets the practical work of self-government.
Tocqueville's answer is neither triumphalist nor mournful. Democratic equality unleashes an astonishing associational energy: Americans, he observed, form societies for everything, and these "little schools of democracy" cultivate habits of cooperation that keep the state modest. But equality also produces a characteristic new pathology — the "tyranny of the majority," in which public opinion flattens dissent more effectively than any king could. Worse, the democratic citizen, withdrawn into private life, may come to accept a soft, administrative despotism that leaves him comfortable but infantilized.
His second great subject was the The French Revolution. The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856) argues, counter-intuitively, that the Revolution did not so much break the centralizing absolutism of the Bourbons as complete it. John Stuart Mill regarded Tocqueville as his most important contemporary influence; virtually every later theorist of civil society — Putnam, Habermas, the communitarians — has read him carefully.