Alexis de tocqueville's7/7/2023 ![]() ![]() It was this same tension, however, that provided the underlying creative impulse behind the extraordinarily dispassionate analyses of modern society contained in his two major works, Democracy in America (1835) and The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856). In his personal life this conflict of values proved almost too great to contain, and in his final years he succumbed to melancholy, despairing of the future of liberty and culture in Europe. Convinced of the irreversibility of democracy and contemptuous of reactionaries who thought they could block this historical movement, he was nevertheless obsessed by the erosion of those traditional contexts and values-aristocracy, honor, localism, religion, cultural variety-on which European liberty had depended for so many centuries. Tension between traditional and modern values dominated Tocqueville’s life and writings. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) lived at the time of two revolutions, the democratic and the industrial their impact upon the traditional order furnished him with the major themes of his scholarly work. ![]()
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