Democracy in America / de la Démocratie En Amérique (in Four Volumes) - by Alexis De Tocqueville (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville and his friend Gustave de Beaumont visited the United States. From Tocqueville's copious notes of what he had seen and heard came the classic text De la Démocratie en Amérique, first published in two large volumes, one in 1835, the second in 1840. The first volume focused primarily on political society; the second, on civil society.

The Liberty Fund four-volume bilingual Democracy in America includes Eduardo Nolla's critical edition of the French text and notes on the left-hand pages and James Schleifer's English translation, with notes, on the right. This is the fullest historical critical edition of the Democracy, and the notes offer an extensive selection of early outlines, drafts, manuscript variants, marginalia, unpublished fragments, and other materials.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) was a French writer and politician.

Eduardo Nolla is a Professor at the Universidad San Pablo-CEU, Madrid.

James T. Schleifer is emeritus Dean of the Library and Professor of History at the College of New Rochelle and has been a visiting lecturer at Yale University.

Review Quotes

Times Literary Supplement
October 8, 2010

The bilingual Liberty Fund edition of Democracy in America, edited by Eduardo Nolla and translated by James T. Schleifer, provides an unprecedented insight into how Tocqueville's text was written and how its content evolved over time . . . . The great merit of the Liberty Fund edition is that it enables us, for the first time, to gauge the immensity of that undertaking . . . . What makes this edition of Democracy in America not only a new edition but also, as the editor remarks, a different edition is that the extraordinary complexity of the writing of Tocqueville's text is here made clearly visible to the reader. . . . Eduardo Nolla's new edition of Democracy in America, therefore, represents a landmark in Tocqueville scholarship and surpasses all editions previously published. The text is elegantly and faultlessly tranlasted by James Schleifer. The four volumes, with the French and English versions on facing pages, are produced to the highest quality and contain an excellently chosen set of illustrations.