Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America

This essay offers a review of Jeremy Jennings's latest monograph, which navigates the waters of Tocqueville’s life and thought through the distinctive prism of travelling. The famous voyage that took him and Gustave de Beaumont to the United States in 1831 and that set the groundwork for the two volumes of his most famous work has in fact overshadowed the multiple journeys that he made throughout his relatively short but intense life. In retrieving and chronicling Tocqueville’s “travels beyond America”, Jennings offers a lively, beautifully written, and incredibly engaging narrative that stimulates both the academic and the non-academic readers, drawing on his life-long familiarity with the primary sources and the secondary literature while also unlocking the door of his historical erudition to the non-specialist public.