Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville was a French political philosopher and historian who visited the United States in 1831 to study its prison system and came back with a searching analysis of democracy itself. Democracy in America (1835–40) remains the most penetrating external study of American society ever written. His other major work, The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856), examined why France could not make democracy work in the same period. He served briefly as Foreign Minister of France in 1849.