General Introduction

In 1838, Tocqueville was elected a member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences; a year later, he was elected as a deputy to the Chamber of Deputies. In 1844, he became one of the proprietors of a newspaper published in Paris, Le Commerce. The two texts below reflect these different aspects of Tocqueville's political career. The first was written as a speech before the Chamber of Deputies, the second as a report to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. The importance Tocqueville attached to the latter is perhaps best judged by the fact that Tocqueville subsequently republished this text as an appendix to the twelfth French edition of Democracy in America (1848).

If Tocqueville's parliamentary career during the 1840s was something of a disappointment to him, on one subject at least he had an important impact. In 1844, he presented a report before parliament on prison reform. The context was one of a perceived increase in lawlessness and of growing fears of popular disorder. In presenting his report, Tocqueville drew extensively upon his earlier investigations in America and, in effect, restated the arguments both for and against the Philadelphia and Auburn systems, opting decisively for what he regarded as a meliorated and slightly relaxed version of the former. There is no need here to rehearse the detailed (and often heated) polemics that took place over this issue, but it was Tocqueville's view that the Philadelphia system of solitary confinement was the more effective and efficient of the two alternatives.