The Third Democracy: Tocqueville Views of America after 1840.

The two volumes of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America offered the image of an accomplished and successful American democracy. Tocqueville lived nineteen more years after the publication of Volume Two and although he never wrote a third volume of Democracy, he continued to be interested in American political events and exchanged a number of important letters with his American friends. Did Tocqueville change his views on America outlined in the two volumes published in 1835 and 1840? If so, which of his views did change and why? Did the evolution of his views of America affect his theory of democracy? This paper seeks to answer these questions by examining Tocqueville’s correspondence and, to a lesser extent, his participation in the constitutional debates of 1848 in France. Its purpose is to reconstruct from the letters that Tocqueville exchanged with his American friends after 1840 what the third volume of Democracy might have looked like if it were ever written. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]