St. John's College

St. John's College

Teachers Institute: "Democracy in America"

Monday, July 28, 2025 at 2:00 PM until Thursday, July 31, 2025 at 4:00 PMEastern Daylight Time UTC -04:00

SUMMARY
Join us for an engaging online seminar focused on Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Tocqueville’s work has the local aim of illuminating the origins, commitments, contradictions, and future of the American democratic republic. And in so doing it brings remarkable clarity to the place and significance of the township system, religion, landscape, race, and local associations to American political life in the first third of the 19th century. But the work has more global aims, too, which gradually emerge out of Tocqueville’s discussion of the American case. It stands as a model for how to think and write about political systems generally and helps all students see “the political” in its full complexity.

EDITION
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville (Translation by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop), University of Chicago Press ISBN: 978-0226805368

READING SCHEDULE

MONDAY
  • Introduction (pp. 3–15)
  • Part One:
    • Chapter 2 (pp. 27–32),
    • Chapter 3 (pp. 45–53),
    • Chapter 5 (pp. 82–90),
    • Chapter 6 (pp. 93–98),
    • Chapter 8 (pp. 107–108, 128–134, 150–154);
  • Part Two:
    • Chapter 1 (pg. 165),
    • Chapter 5 (pp. 187–192, 199–202) [~65 pages]
TUESDAY
  • Volume One, Part Two:
    • Chapters 6–9 (pp. 220-302) [~82 pages]
WEDNESDAY
  • Volume Two, Part One:
    • Notice,
    • Chapters 1–21 (pp. 399–400, 403–476) [~75 pages]
THURSDAY
  • Volume Two, Part Two: 
    • Chapters 1–4, 8–20;
  • Volume Two, Part Three:
    • Chapters 1–4, 7–14 (pp. 479–488, 500–532, 535–545, 555–581) [~81 pages]
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