[16] In 1847, Tocqueville sought to found a Young Left (Jeune Gauche) party which would advocate wage increases, a progressive tax,[17] and other labor concerns in order to undermine the appeal of the socialists.

[20]A supporter of Cavaignac and of the Party of Order, Tocqueville accepted an invitation to enter Odilon Barrot's government as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 3 June to 31 October 1849.

During the troubled days of June 1849, he pleaded with Interior Minister Jules Armand Dufaure for the reestablishment of the state of siege in the capital and approved the arrest of demonstrators.

He [hoped] to bring the kind of stability to French political life that would permit the steady growth of liberty unimpeded by the regular rumblings of the earthquakes of revolutionary change″.

In 1831, Tocqueville obtained from the July Monarchy a mission to examine prisons and penitentiaries in the United States and proceeded there with his lifelong friend Gustave de Beaumont.

While they did visit some prisons, Tocqueville and Beaumont traveled widely in the United States: from the east-coast cities to what was then the north-west frontier, Michigan; by steamboat down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans; and by stagecoach across the South back toward the east coast and north to New York.

[25] He returned within nine months and published a report, The Penitentiary System in the United States, although the more well-known result of his tour was his major work Democracy in America, which appeared in 1835.

[28]: xvi  Tocqueville had intended the joint impressions of their trip to Britain and Ireland would form the basis of a work by Beaumont, just as their common reflections of the United States on had served as him as material for Democracy in America.

[35] While she appeared to be comparatively devout, Tocqueville's own attitude toward religion has been described as "utilitarian", regarding it as a "social cement, a safety valve for passions that might otherwise feed a revolutionary torrent dangerous to individual liberty".

Observing from the perspective of a detached social scientist, Tocqueville wrote of his travels through the United States in the early 19th century when the Market Revolution, Western expansion and Jacksonian democracy were radically transforming the fabric of American life.

[25][45] According to political scientist Joshua Kaplan, Tocqueville did not originate the concept of individualism, instead he changed its meaning and saw it as a "calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and to withdraw into the circle of family and friends ... .

"In such conditions, we might become so enamored with 'a relaxed love of present enjoyments' that we lose interest in the future of our descendants...and meekly allow ourselves to be led in ignorance by a despotic force all the more powerful because it does not resemble one", wrote The New Yorker's James Wood.

[47] Tocqueville worried that if despotism were to take root in a modern democracy, it would be a much more dangerous version than the oppression under the Roman emperors or tyrants of the past who could only exert a pernicious influence on a small group of people at a time.

[25] In contrast, landed elites in the United States were less likely to pass on fortunes to a single child by the action of primogeniture, which meant that as time went by large estates became broken up within a few generations which in turn made the children more equal overall.

[25] According to Joshua Kaplan's Tocqueville, it was not always a negative development since bonds of affection and shared experience between children often replaced the more formal relation between the eldest child and the siblings, characteristic of the previous aristocratic pattern.

[citation needed] As Tocqueville understood it, this rapidly democratizing society had a population devoted to "middling" values which wanted to amass through hard work vast fortunes.

At the same time in the United States, workers would see people fashioned in exquisite attire and merely proclaim that through hard work they too would soon possess the fortune necessary to enjoy such luxuries.

[citation needed] Beyond the eradication of old-world aristocracy, ordinary Americans also refused to defer to those possessing, as Tocqueville put it, superior talent and intelligence, and these natural elites could not enjoy much share in political power as a result.

They could join limited intellectual circles to explore the weighty and complex problems facing society, or they could use their superior talents to amass vast fortunes in the private sector.

[51] Tocqueville concluded that return of the Black population to Africa could not resolve the problem, as he writes at the end of Democracy in America: If the colony of Liberia were able to receive thousands of new inhabitants every year, and if the Negroes were in a state to be sent thither with advantage; if the Union were to supply the society with annual subsidies, and to transport the Negroes to Africa in government vessels, it would still be unable to counterpoise the natural increase of population among the blacks; and as it could not remove as many men in a year as are born upon its territory within that time, it could not prevent the growth of the evil which is daily increasing in the states.

Still, as the persevering enemy of despotism everywhere, and under all its forms, I am pained and astonished by the fact that the freest people in the world is, at the present time, almost the only one among civilized and Christian nations which yet maintains personal servitude; and this while serfdom itself is about disappearing, where it has not already disappeared, from the most degraded nations of Europe.An old and sincere friend of America, I am uneasy at seeing Slavery retard her progress, tarnish her glory, furnish arms to her detractors, compromise the future career of the Union which is the guaranty of her safety and greatness, and point out beforehand to her, to all her enemies, the spot where they are to strike.

[52]French historian of colonialism Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison argues that Tocqueville (along with Jules Michelet) was ahead of his time in his use of the term "extermination" to describe what was happening during the colonization of Western United States and the Indian removal period.

Tocqueville shared many views on assimilation and segregation of his and the coming epochs but opposed Arthur de Gobineau's theories as found in An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–1855).

That after having burned all the public registers before suffering to read them, and having destroyed or dispersed all of the civil service without inquiring into their various attributions, he should finally seize every functionary⸺from the head of the government to the campesino guards, the peers, the deputies, and in general the whole ruling class⸺and deport them all at once to some distant country.

Why is it more odious to burn harvests and take women and children prisoner than to bombard the harmless population of a besieged city or to seize merchant ships belonging to the subjects of an enemy power at sea?

[citation needed] Although Tocqueville had favoured retention of distinct traditional law, administrators, schools and so on for Arabs who had come under French control, he compared the Berber tribes of Kabylia (in his second of Two Letters on Algeria, 1837) to Rousseau's concept of the "noble savage", stating: If Rousseau had known the Kabyles ... he would not have spouted so much nonsense about the Caribbean and other American Indians: He would have looked to the Atlas for his models; there he would have found men who are subject to a kind of social police and yet almost as free as the isolated individual who enjoys his wild independence in the depths of the woods; men who are neither rich nor poor, neither servants nor masters; who appoint their own chiefs, and scarcely notice that they have chiefs, who are content with their state and remain in it[70]Tocqueville's views on the matter were complex.

[74] More particularly he reminds his countrymen of a solemn caution whereby he warns them that if the methods used towards the Algerian people remain unchanged, colonization will end in a blood bath.

Such laws are not discussed in detail; however, given that the goal of the French mission in Algeria was to obtain commercial and military interest as opposed to self-defense, it can be deduced that Tocqueville would not concur with just war theory's jus ad bellum criteria of just cause.

Furthermore, given that Tocqueville approved of the use of force to eliminate civilian housing in enemy territory, his approach does not accord with just war theory's jus in bello criteria of proportionality and discrimination.

[76] Tocqueville was quoted in several chapters of Toby Young's memoirs How to Lose Friends and Alienate People to explain his observation of widespread homogeneity of thought even amongst intellectual elites at Harvard University during his time spent there.