Alexis de Tocqueville

Wang Huning and Alexis de Tocqueville’s dark vision of the future.

Tocqueville understood how constitutional review, without meaningful checks, could enable judicial despotism.

Alexis de Tocqueville left France to study the American prison system and returned with the material that would become “Democracy in America.”

Liberalism’s relationship to equality has, his­torically, been far from a warm embrace.

The US Supreme Court's most recent decisions undermine centuries of established secularism within American government.

American government succeeded, Tocqueville thought, because it didn’t empower the people too much.

Black archivists, activists, and artists are fighting for justice and ethical remembrance — and reimagining the archive itself.

Reflections on Alexander Hamilton, Alexis de Tocqueville, and the power of the presidency.

How the New England town became the mythical landscape of American democracy.

Looking to the French Revolution and the writings of Tocqueville for insight into Trump’s America.

Dickens, Tocqueville, and the U.N. all agree about this American invention: It’s torture.

The rise and fall of the Post Office from Tocqueville to Fred Rogers.

A liberalism that divides humanity into a master class and a slave class deserves an asterisk as “white liberalism.”

An excess of restrictions has taken a very real toll on the lives of everyday Americans. Their stories must be told.

On the fragile facade of republicanism in 19th century America.

On Samuel Moyn's Cold War liberalism.

The American foreign policy sage was driven as much by pessimism about the US as antipathy to the Soviet Union.

Jedediah Purdy's new book examines why the U.S. has continuously failed to qualify as a system defined by popular rule.

The author confronts the daunting task of writing about her childhood memory, both as a memoirist and a historian.

A new book chronicles the life of the 19th century political giant of Salmon Chase.