"Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)-who was born in the shadow of the French Revolution and died a few years before the American Civil War-witnessed a remarkable era in the history of the West. His aristocratic family survived the revolutionary period, though many branches were cut down during the Terror, and Alexis grew up with a keen understanding that one world was ending and a new one was being born. Adventurous and curious, he traveled extensively in North America as a young man. There, he trained his observant eyes on his official duties-documenting conditions in the prison system-but became fascinated with America's experiments in democracy. Tocqueville was an avid political theorist, and he recorded his impressions in Democracy in America, still read to this day and considered one of the most provocative and insightful commentaries on the American experience. Tocqueville remained both an intellectual and an active politician for the majority of his life. He watched the revolutions take hold in 1848 across Europe, and he died in 1859, after penning his other famous work, The Old Regime and the Revolution. In this book, Olivier Zunz aims to convey how the world in which Tocqueville lived became his laboratory for political theory. Without downplaying Tocqueville's anxieties about the future, or about democracy's potential pathologies, Zunz places dedication to achieving a new kind of democracy at the center of his subject's life and work. He takes seriously Tocqueville's attempts to apply the lessons of his texts to French politics, and, throughout, he looks to Tocqueville's political career and activism as a guide to the meaning of his major texts. Drawing on his unparalleled familiarity with Tocqueville's own words and letters, Zunz offers a definitive biography of a remarkable thinker whose life formed a ligature between the ancien régime and the emerging democratic age"-- "A definitive biography of the French aristocrat who became one of democracy's greatest champions. In 1831, at the age of twenty-five, Alexis de Tocqueville made his fateful journey to America, where he observed the thrilling reality of a functioning democracy. From that moment onward, the French aristocrat would dedicate his life as a writer and politician to ending despotism in his country and bringing it into a new age. In this authoritative and groundbreaking biography, leading Tocqueville expert Olivier Zunz tells the story of a radical thinker who, uniquely charged by the events of his time, both in America and France, used the world as a laboratory for his political ideas.Placing Tocqueville's dedication to achieving a new kind of democracy at the center of his life and work, Zunz traces Tocqueville's evolution into a passionate student and practitioner of liberal politics across a trove of correspondence with intellectuals, politicians, constituents, family members, and friends. While taking seriously Tocqueville's attempts to apply the lessons of Democracy in America to French politics, Zunz shows that the United States, and not only France, remained central to Tocqueville's thought and actions throughout his life. In his final years, with France gripped by an authoritarian regime and America divided by slavery, Tocqueville feared that the democratic experiment might be failing. Yet his passion for democracy never weakened.Giving equal attention to the French and American sources of Tocqueville's unique blend of political philosophy and political action, The Man Who Understood Democracy offers the richest, most nuanced portrait yet of a man who, born between the worlds of aristocracy and democracy, fought tirelessly for the only system that he believed could provide both liberty and equality"--