Tocqueville and his America: a darker horizon

Introduction: A brief life of Alexis de Tocqueville

Part I: Triple-alienated man

Identity in a time of historical transition

Class: between two worlds

Intimacy

Ambition

Melancholy

Skeptical romantic

Skeptical philosophe

Skepticism and religion: "une ombre vaine"

Doubt and the will to believe

Exile: voiceless in Cannes

Part II: The calling of politics

Vocation: politics as calling

Tocqueville's "beau rêve"

Vocation: the responsibilities of political leaders

The Dead Sea of politics

Tocqueville's aristocratic liberalism

Part III: Writing Democracy in America

A moral landscape

A moral history

Escape

The new world: fable, romance, history

Tocqueville in the wilderness

Transformations

Beginning Democracy in America

Influences: voices in the tower

Writing as moral act

History as moral drama

The birth of a book

Part IV: Tocqueville's America

Tocqueville's American notebooks and Democracy in America

Traveling through the new republic with Tocqueville and Beaumont

Democratic religion: mad messiahs and chaste women

Class in an egalitarian society

Born-again America: the creation of an American identity

Politics: order and disorder in the new republic

A dark vision of democracy's prospects

The democratic psyche and the hazards of equality

A culture of extremes: the prospects for freedom in a culture without limits

A brief chronological narrative of the life of Alexis de Tocqueville.