Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville, was born 29 July 1805 into a noble family that had survived the Revolution's turmoil. He traveled to the United States in the early 1830s, and the two volumes that followed - Democracy in America, published in 1835 and 1840 - became an early landmark of sociology and political science, dissecting how individuals related to markets and states in Western societies. He served in French politics under the July Monarchy and the Second Republic after the February 1848 Revolution, a classical liberal skeptical of majoritarianism's extremes, drifting from centre-left to centre-right in parliament. After Louis Napoléon Bonaparte's coup on 2 December 1851, Tocqueville withdrew and began The Old Regime and the Revolution, published in 1856, arguing that the Revolution's real work was to accelerate the centralizing modernization that Louis XIV had started, and that its failure stemmed from deputies too stuck on abstract Enlightenment ideals. He died 16 April 1859, leaving a liberalism so restless that progressives and conservatives across continents have claimed him ever since.