Tocqueville : the aristocratic sources of liberty / Lucien Jaume ; translated by Arthur Goldhammer.

Translation of: Tocqueville : les sources aristocratiques de la liberté biographie intellectuelle. Paris : Fayard, c2008.

Includes bibliographies and index.

What did Tocqueville mean by "democracy"? -- Attacking the French tradition : popular sovereignty redefined in and through local liberties -- Democracy as modern religion -- Democracy as expectation of material pleasures -- Tocqueville as sociologist -- In the tradition of Montesquieu : the state-society analogy -- Counterrevolutionary traditionalism : a muffled polemic -- The discovery of the collective -- Tocqueville and the Protestantism of his time: the insistent reality of the collective -- Tocqueville as moralist -- The moralist and the question of l'honnte -- Tocqueville's relation to Jansenism -- Tocqueville in literature: democratic language without declared authority -- Resisting the democratic tendencies of language -- Tocqueville in the debate about literature and society -- The great contemporaries : models and countermodels -- Tocqueville and Guizot : two conceptions of authority -- Tutelary figures from Malesherbes to Chateaubriand.

Many American readers like to regard Alexis de Tocqueville as an honorary American and democrat--as the young French aristocrat who came to early America and, enthralled by what he saw, proceeded to write an American book explaining democratic America to itself. Yet, as Lucien Jaume argues in this acclaimed intellectual biography, Democracy in America is best understood as a French book, written primarily for the French, and overwhelmingly concerned with France. "America, " Jaume says, "was merely a pretext for studying modern society and the woes of France."

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In English.