SOURCE: "Tocqueville and American Literary Critics," in Liberty, Equality, Democracy, edited by Eduardo Nolla, New York University Press, 1992, pp. 143-52.

In this essay, Strout discusses Tocqueville's comments and prophecies regarding American literature.

Tocqueville's Democracy in America wavers between alarming prophecies about democracy in general and more sanguine comments about America in particular. What he sought in his book, as he confessed to his friend Kergorlay, was "less the complete picture of that foreign society than its contrasts and resemblances to our own."¹ There is on the one hand the possible coming, especially in Europe, of a "democratic despotism" marked by bureaucratic paternalism and the alienation of the citizen from political participation and potency. Modern American conditions have made that vision seem pertinent to many sociologists. There is on the other hand the America with some antibodies against the diseases of modernity because, in contrast to Europe, it has...