Alexis de Tocqueville is the author of three great books: Democracy in America, The Old Regime and the Revolution, and the posthumously published Recollections of the French Revolution of 1848. The first two are carefully crafted and philosophically astute guides to the “democratic revolution” that was in the process of transforming the Western Christian world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As a statesman and political philosopher, Tocqueville hoped against hope that this revolution would culminate in a human and political order consistent with liberty and human dignity, doing justice to both the equality of human beings and the “greatness” of man, which transcended the horizon of democratic equality. In these works, his rhetoric is measured and eloquent, carefully calibrated to the great task of defending human liberty and dignity in an age beset by new and troubling democratic discontents.

Recollections (Souvenirsin French) is the least known—and read—of these three great works. That should no longer be the case after the publication of this magnificent and truly authoritative new edition of that work. This “absolutely thrilling” book, as Raymond Aron called it, gives us unique access to Tocqueville the human being and thinker. It is deeply personal without ever being self-indulgent. Tocqueville wrote it for the drawer, or rather for posthumous publication. It only appeared (in an expurgated form) in 1893, thirty-four years after Tocqueville’s death, and a complete edition had to wait until 1942 for publication. Its translator, Arthur Goldhammer, expertly captures