Selections from de Tocqueville's Democracy in America: A Frenchman Assays the Spirit Behind American Business Expansion in the 1830's

Abstract

What kind of a people were the Americans who so energetically drove forward American business expansion in the nineteenth century? We find something of an answer in little vignettes scattered through a book of observations on travel in the United States in the early 1830's, which has become a classic description of American life and people. Its author, Alexis de Tocqueville, was not particularly concerned with business; he was interested chiefly in the American experiment in democracy. Yet his observations are extremely suggestive. He gives a glimpse of the general esprit of the American, of his motives or objectives, of his restlessness and his energy, of the generally fluid state of American society, and of the vastness of American opportunity. De Tocqueville's observations are not objective descriptions; they are the impressions and interpretations of a philosophical observer and student of society who was familiar with England as well as Western Europe. From the perspective of today, they appear remarkably keen; indeed they were in large measure prophetic of what came to pass. In speaking of the American people he says that “boldness of enterprise is the foremost cause of its rapid progress, its strength, and it greatness.”