Democracy in America

by Alexis de Tocqueville

When, after casting a rapid glance at American society in 1650, one examines the state of Europe, and particularly the continent, around that same period, one feels suffused with profound astonishment: everywhere on the continent of Europe at the beginning of the seventeenth century, absolute royalty was triumphing over the debris of the oligarchic and feudal freedom of the Middle Ages. In the heart of that brilliant and literary Europe the idea of rights had perhaps never been more completely misunderstood; never had peoples less lived a political life; never had notions of true freedom less preoccupied minds; and it was then that these same principles, unknown in European nations or scorned by them, were being proclaimed in the wilderness of the New World and were becoming the future creed of a great people. In that society, so humble in appearance, the boldest theories of the human mind, with which undoubtedly no statesman then had deigned to be occupied, were brought into practice; left to the originality of its nature, the imagination of man improvised there an unprecedented legislation.