Notes from the Editor

Abstract

For more than a century and a half, Democracy in America has been an indispensable starting point for understanding American politics. After the second volume of Democracy was published in 1840, Tocqueville continued to monitor political developments in this country and committed many of his thoughts to paper, in letters to friends in America. Unfortunately, his epistolary ruminations have never been translated into English, and their very existence seems to have largely been ignored until now. In “The Third Democracy: Tocqueville's Views of America after 1840,” Aurelian Craiutu and Jeremy Jennings use the post-1840 letters to tell the rest of the story—or, as they put it, to “reconstruct what Volume Three of Democracy might have looked like if it had ever been written.” (The portrayal of party canvassing on the cover of this issue commemorates that period in American politics.) Craiutu and Jennings's creative reconstruction reveals a significant change in Tocqueville's perspective, and more specifically a growing disenchantment with America occasioned by his sense that such problems as corruption, slavery, imperialism, and the encroachment of the economic sphere upon the political would jeopardize freedom and stability in America. Thus, rather than the relatively sunny picture that emerged from the first two volumes of Democracy, Craiutu and Jennings argue that the excesses of democracy in America would have been the central focus of the final volume of Tocqueville's seminal work.