There is no small historical irony in the fact that Alexis de Tocqueville, a French aristocrat, is the one of the most renowned observers of American democracy. The many twists and turns in his personal biography that led him to America inspire the imagination, while the length of his theoretical vision has pushed generations of scholars to study his works. To many, we need look no further than the words of the great text Democracy in America to understand what Tocqueville can say to the twenty-first century.

In contrast to this approach, I have written this book with the conviction that to understand what Tocqueville can mean today, we need to step beyond the words of the text and come to understand them in the context and for the purpose of which they were written. In short, we need to understand Tocqueville in his time. Most importantly, we need to remember that Tocqueville did not write Democracy in America for the United States: he wrote it for France. We need to understand the France he wrote it for as much as the America he saw, and it is above all to the political culture of France that we must look to in order to make sense of his purposes and meanings. Put differently, Tocqueville came to America with a certain amount of cultural baggage. This baggage not only shaped what he wanted to study, but also informed how he conceived of America.

The first goal of this book is to tell the story of just one part of this cultural heritage. I argue that the French Catholic movement known as ‘Jansenism,’ which Tocqueville found largely but not exclusively in the works of Blaise Pascal, was part of the baggage he brought with him to America. Although there is historical value in adding this Jansenist element to Tocqueville's intellectual biography, I also argue that this Jansenist influence gives evidence of the fundamentally republican nature of his political thought.

The second goal of this book is to make Alexis de Tocqueville's political theory relevant to today. Indeed, even though Tocqueville was a great predictor, we have in many ways moved beyond the length of his vision.