Democracy in America
A young French aristocrat toured America for nine months and returned to write the most penetrating analysis of democratic society ever produced: its strengths, its tyranny of the majority, its restless materialism, its civic virtue. Two centuries later, every sentence reads as prophecy.
Volume two is the weaker half, readers finishing volume one enthusiastic and then stalling in abstract aristocracy-versus-democracy comparisons. He “spends pages expressing one idea but in lots of slightly different ways,” and the “long, long sentences” make it the “most demanding piece of exposition I've read since Hegel's Phenomenology” even for admirers; the “writing could have been greatly improved with a reliable editor.” The methodological complaint has teeth: “generalizations based on single observations,” a man who “praised New England town meetings but never bothered to observe one” and “declined to engage the president himself when he had the opportunity.” His asides on enslaved people and on women land badly.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
