Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1835) has long been a touchstone for almost any discussion of the American polity. Tocqueville, a 29-year-old French nobleman, traveled the breadth of Jacksonian America with his friend Gustave de Beaumont to inquire into the future of French society as revolutionary upheaval gave way to a representative government similar to America's. In Tocqueville in America, George Wilson Pierson reconstructs - from...