Harold Macmillan Book

Damrosch does an excellent job of tracing Tocqueville and his companion's trip across America and their changing thoughts and feelings about the country. Damrosch refers to Tocqueville's book as "prescient" and that is exactly how I felt years ago reading it for a class. Perhaps only an outsider could have been so spot-on about the effects of democracy on a culture. If you read it for yourself, you will probably think, as I did, "could he really have been writing in the early 19th-century?" Because it shows remarkable insight (and foresight). "In proportion as slavery departs, the whites grow more afraid of mixing the races and grow more contemptuous. The law is less harsh, but hatred is more so." He is anticipating here the work of 20th century anthropologists like Victor Turner and Mary Douglas. Freed African-Americans were thrust into a social limbo--a liminal state as Turner called it--they were hated and feared for no longer being in a fixed, controllable category. Tocqueville, in many ways, was a social anthropologist before the discipline existed and his book shows many such insights.