Tocqueville, his informants, and the American people he found so illuminating.
Democracy in America is not a novel; its cast is partly the author and his informants, partly the social types that populate his analysis. The named interlocutors are figures Tocqueville actually met; the American People is the aggregate subject of the entire sociology.
Born 1805 into old Norman nobility. A magistrate by training, a political philosopher by vocation. Twenty-five when he sailed; thirty when Volume I appeared. The book's voice is his — patrician, precise, melancholic. He admires much of what he sees in America and is disturbed by almost as much. The ambivalence is the argument.
Travelled with Tocqueville for all nine months. Co-author of the official prison report. His own American book, Marie, addresses race and slavery more directly than Tocqueville does. Without Beaumont in the carriage, the notebooks — and the book — would have been different.
Seventh president of the United States, in office during Tocqueville's visit. The populist style of his administration confirmed Tocqueville's fears about the dangers of unmediated majoritarianism. Jackson does not appear by name often, but his shadow falls across the chapters on majority tyranny.
Not the institutions but the people — the New England townsman at the meeting, the Methodist preacher in the settlements, the lawyer, the planter, the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears. A population shaped by equality of condition into a new kind of human being: anxious, energetic, uniform in opinion, restless, more confident than any Europeans in its capacity to manage its own affairs. The portrait drawn in 1831 was recognisably a portrait of Americans for at least the next century.