Tocqueville, Alexis Charles Henri Clérel de (1805–1859)

French politician, sociologist, and historian. He was the author of the first analytical study of the strengths and weaknesses of US society, De la Démocratie en Amérique/Democracy in America (1835). He also wrote a penetrating description of France before the Revolution, L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution/The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856).

Elected to the Chamber of Deputies 1839, Tocqueville became vice-president of the Constituent Assembly and minister of foreign affairs 1849. He retired after Napoleon III's coup 1851. No other 19th-century liberal thinker saw the problems of contemporary democratic society quite as clearly as Tocqueville.