Ideas in France Since the Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2012). He is now writing a book titled Travels with Tocqueville.
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ALAN S. KAHAN is professor of British civilization at the Université de Versailles/St. Quentin-en-Yvelines. He received his PhD in history from the University of Chicago in 1987. His most recent books are Mind vs. Money: The War between Intellectuals and Capitalism (Transaction, 2010) and Alexis de Tocqueville (Continuum, 2010). He has also translated Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revolution (Chicago, 1998). His book Tocqueville, Religion, and Democracy: Checks and Balances for Democratic Souls will be published by Oxford University Press in 2015.
HARVEY C. MANSFIELD is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he studies and teaches political philosophy. He has held Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, has served on the advisory council of the NEH, and is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He has written on Edmund Burke and the nature of political parties, on Machiavelli and the invention of indirect government, in defense of a defensible liberalism, and in favor of a constitutional American political science. He has also written on the discovery and development of the theory of executive power and is a translator of Machiavelli and Tocqueville. He is presently working on a book on Machiavelli, summarizing and carrying forward earlier work.
REIJI MATSUMOTO graduated from the University of Tokyo (BA in 1969, MA in 1971), started his professional career at the University of Tsukuba, and has been teaching political theory at Waseda University since 1982. He is known as a leading Tocqueville scholar in Japan for his books and articles on Tocqueville as well as for his four-volume Japanese translation of Democracy in America (Iwanami Bunko). Among his English publications are “Tocqueville on the Family” and “Is Democracy Peaceful? Tocqueville and Constant on War and the Army” (both in the Tocqueville Review), and “Tocqueville and Japan” (in Conversations with Tocqueville, ed. Craiutu and Gellar).
EDUARDO NOLLA is professor of political theory and rector at Universidad Camilo José Cela, Madrid. He was a visiting scholar at Yale University from 1981 to 1985 and taught there full time from 1986 to 1992. He is the author of numerous books and articles on Tocqueville and the editor of The Historical-Critical Edition of “Democracy in America.” In 1993, he was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des
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Lettres of the French Republic. He is a member of the Tocqueville Commission and the academic director of Unidad Editorial, Spain’s leading media group
FILIPPO SABETTI is professor of political science at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and an affiliated member of the Tocqueville Program and a Senior Research Fellow of the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University–Bloomington. Much of Sabetti’s work is concerned with the development of liberal and federalist thought and the practice of self-governance in Canada and Europe. His most recent book, Civilization and Self-Government: The Political Thought of Carlo Cattaneo (Lexington Books, 2010), reveals why the nineteenth-century pioneering analysis of Cattaneo merits a place, alongside Tocqueville, in our continuing debate about the meaning of civilization, liberty, and political economy. His current project extends that inquiry to about ten centuries of political thought and practice on the Italian peninsula in order to uncover the creative capacities of people as creators of the world in which they lived, thereby discovering the past to improve the future prospects of liberty, individual responsibility, and life in common.
JAMES T. SCHLEIFER, professor emeritus of history and former dean of Gill Library at the College of New Rochelle, received his PhD in history from Yale University. Internationally recognized as a Tocqueville scholar, he has taught as a visiting professor at Yale University and at the University of Paris and has lectured at universities in the United States and abroad. His major publications include The Making of Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” (University of North Carolina Press, 1980; second revised edition published by Liberty Fund, 2000); The Chicago Companion to Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” (University of Chicago Press, 2012); as coeditor, critical edition of De la démocratie en Amérique, in the Pléiade series published by Gallimard (Paris, 1992); and as translator, the complete critical edition of Democracy in America, edited by Eduardo Nolla and published by Liberty Fund (4 vols., 2010).
CHERYL B. WELCH is senior lecturer and director of undergraduate studies in government at Harvard University. Her teaching and research interests are in the history of political thought (especially
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nineteenth-century France), liberal and democratic theory, and the history of human rights. She is the author of Liberty and Utility: The French Idéologues and the Transformation of Liberalism (1984) and De Tocqueville (2001), and the editor of Critical Issues in Social Theory (with M. Milgate, 1989) and The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville (2006). Welch has also published articles on liberalism, on utilitarianism, and on the works of Alexis de Tocqueville, and is coeditor of The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville. She is currently working on two projects: a book on the history of the concept of humanity in early nineteenth-century European thought and a study of the fate of utilitarianism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century francophone thought.
CATHERINE H. ZUCKERT is Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame where she also serves as editor-in-chief of the Review of Politics. Her books include Natural Right and the American Imagination: Political Philosophy in Novel Form; Postmodern Platos: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida; Plato’s Philosophers; as well as The Truth about Leo Strauss and Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy (both coauthored with Michael Zuckert). She has also edited two volumes of essays, Understanding the Political Spirit: From Socrates to Nietzsche and Political Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Authors and Arguments.
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No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.
—Attributed to Heraclitus
For while traveling, one is never the absolute master of one’s movements. One often does something other than one would have imagined.
—Tocqueville to Nassau Senior, November 15, 1857
I do not need to travel across heaven and earth to find a marvelous subject full of contrast, of grandeur and infinite pettiness, of profound obscurities and singular clarity, capable at the same time of giving birth to pity, admiration, contempt, terror. I have only to consider myself.
—Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Voyages are about change. We change as we journey and encounter new places, ideas, and people; the place to which we journey changes as it moves from an abstraction to a reality and as we explore, understand, and live within it; upon our return, we find our homeland changed, for we perceive that homeland through changed eyes. Nothing is the same.
Voyages and the changes they bring are the theme of the present volume.
On April 2, 1831, twenty-six-year-old Alexis de Tocqueville set sail for America, accompanied by his friend Gustave de Beaumont. The official purpose of their voyage, which lasted nine months, was to undertake a comparative study of the U.S. penitentiary system; although the penitentiary report was published in 1833, Tocqueville confessed in an 1835 letter to his friend Louis de Kergorlay that it had merely been “a
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pretext” for their journey.1 The political situation in France had made it expedient for the two magistrates to remove themselves from the country, and they were also interested in studying the American republic, quickly forming—somewhere in the journey’s early phases—plans to write a book together about the United States. With this project in mind, Tocqueville kept notebooks of his observations and thoughts, as well as notes about his various conversations and interviews with Americans. His