Democracy in America, 2nd Edition

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) came to America in 1831 to see what a great republic was like. What struck him most was the country's equality of conditions, its democracy. The book he wrote on his return to France, Democracy in America, is both the best ever written on democracy and the best ever written on America. It remains the most often quoted book about the United States, not only because it has something to interest and please everyone, but also because it has something to teach everyone. When it was published in 2000, Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop's new translation of Democracy in America—only the third since the original two-volume work was published in 1835 and 1840—was lauded in all quarters as the finest and most definitive edition of Tocqueville's classic thus far. Mansfield and Winthrop have restored the nuances of Tocqueville's language, with the expressed goal "to convey Tocqueville's thought as he held it rather than to restate it in comparable terms of today." The result is a translation with minimal interpretation, but with impeccable annotations of unfamiliar references and a masterful introduction placing the work and its author in the broader contexts of political philosophy and statesmanship. 

“"This will be the English translation of Tocqueville for a long time, and it has the additional bonus that the introduction is as succinct an introduction to Tocqueville, or at least to the conservative view of him and his achievement, as one can find."”

"The best edition of the best book on America"; "What we need, here at the beginning of the century, is a fresh examination - one that begins from Tocqueville's own concerns and not from our desire to use him for our political battles. Mansfield and Winthrop... have contributed immeasurably to that task by providing hundreds of notes identifying events, allusions, and names that are no longer familiar, and by providing an accurate and readable translation of Democracy in America, one far superior to the old editions." - Daniel J. Mahoney, Weekly Standard "The Mansfield-Winthrop work will henceforth be the preferred English version of Democracy in America not only because of the superior translation and critical apparatus, but also because of its long and masterly introductory essay, itself an important contribution to the literature on Tocqueville." - Roger Kimball, The New Criterion

Harvey C. Mansfield is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University. Delba Winthrop is a lecturer and administrator of the Program on Constitutional Government at Harvard University.

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