Democracy in America
Alexis de Tocqueville · 1835
A young French aristocrat toured America for nine months and returned to write the most penetrating analysis of democratic society ever produced: its strengths, its tyranny of the majority, its restless materialism, its civic virtue. Two centuries later, every sentence reads as prophecy.
The case against
Nine months of touring became nine hundred pages of generalization, and the second volume abstracts itself into a fog of claims about what democratic peoples must do, some contradicting the first. Tocqueville's prophecies get quoted selectively because for every bullseye there is a confident miss. Read Volume One; skim Two; nobody checks.
Non-Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
