Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America

"If there’s a book I enjoyed for personal reasons, it’s Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America by Jeremy Jennings, a political theorist at King’s College London. Tocqueville’s book on the French Revolution was the bane of my life during my undergraduate degree in history at Oxford where, week after week in our first term, we had to analyze passages from it in what were known as ‘gobbets.’ Taking refuge in bad behaviour, my tutorial partner and I would compete in reading out passages in terrible, slow French, trying to delay the inevitable moment when we had to say something about it. I had no idea at the time who Alexis de Tocqueville was, but after I set up Five Books with some friends in 2009, he came back into my life in a big way: Tocqueville’s books were recommended by George Bush’s chief of staff Karl Rove , eminent historian Lynn Hunter, political scientist Francis Fukuyama and even a US Supreme Court Justice, Stephen Breyer . Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It turns out that Tocqueville was a person after my heart. He travelled a great deal, wanting to understand other countries, how they worked, and what he could learn from them. He even liked learning languages, as I do. The book takes us through his trip to the United States (age 19), the basis of his book, Democracy in America , as well as his less-known trips to Algeria, Italy, England and Ireland. Even on his honeymoon to Switzerland, Tocqueville found time to analyse the local system of government, expressing a “lofty disdain for the federal constitution of Switzerland” which he felt was “the most lax, powerless, blundering and incapable that one could imagine.” Given how smoothly Switzerland functions today, it’s quite funny; his mistakes on Algeria less so. This is a book which makes heavy use of primary sources, i.e. you are constantly reading about Tocqueville in his own voice. I love this as a narrative technique, but if you’re interested in Tocqueville and want more of a biography, The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville (2022) by Olivier Zunz is an alternative."