Sean Wilentz on how Tocqueville didn't get everything right about Americans, but understanding him as a real, flawed observer makes his achievement more impressive. When the energetic, young French liberal aristocrats Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont toured the United States in 1831 and 1832 ostensibly to study America's prisons, their minds, not surprisingly, often turned to more alluring subjects. "In addition to a very fine library, our host has two charming daughters with whom we get along very well," Tocqueville wrote to his sister-in-law from a well-appointed home in Canandaigua, New York. "Suffice it to say that we gazed at them even more willingly than at their father's books." The visitors found the young women of the New World more boldly coquettish than their French counterparts but also fiercely unwilling (again, unlike the French) to follow through. Compounding the problem, Beaumont and Tocqueville did not stay anywhere for too long, which gave them too little time either to make or to gain a strong impression. "It's exactly the same with all the beauties I meet, and we see a lot of them in society," Beaumont observed. "We get swept away by them three or four days a week, each of us inciting the other, but it's always new faces, and -- God forgive me -- I believe we always tell them the same things, at the risk of complimenting a brunette on her pale complexion and a blonde on her ebony hair." With arch irony, he then dismissed the sexual banter as "a mere bagatelle" of small interest "to two men of politics who are devoted entirely to speculations of the highest order." Several weeks into the trip, Tocqueville -- described by Leo Damrosch as an appetitive ladies man who, in later years, became a serially unfaithful husband -- noted that his and Beaumont's virtue remained intact but had to confess that they were giving women the once-over "with an impudence that's not appropriate for people studying the penitentiary system." Helping to humanize as well as historicize the young Tocqueville while he was discovering America is the main achievement of Damrosch's concise and absorbing new book. Lacking anything like a sustained formal theoretical explication of early American democracy apart from the Federalist Papers, scholars, journalists, and even public officials have turned to Tocqueville's Democracy in America as the next best thing. The political theorist Sheldon S. Wolin may well have been correct when he claimed, in a major, provocative assessment of Tocqueville published in 2001, that "it is safe to say that today Tocqueville's masterpiece is invoked more often in support of some interpretation of present-day American politics than is the Federalist, even though the latter is commonly represented as the thinking of the Founding Fathers." KEEP READING. . .
