This is the first concise study to give full credit to the collaboration of works between French nobleman, writer and politician Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) and his travel companion and friend Gustave de Beaumont (1802-66), and puts this collaboration into its social, historical and theoretical context.
It accompanies the two friends to the US and analyses the fruitful encounter between the New and the Old World that was the result of that journey, particularly in relation to emerging Atlantic democracies and revolutions. This includes the hopes but also the problems and contradictions that they have come to represent. The book also follows Tocqueville and Beaumont to England, Ireland, and Algeria. It discusses their political careers and their engagement in the abolitionist movement, their fight for liberal social and political reform, as well as their futile attempt to rationalize French colonization in Algeria.

Andreas Hess is Professor at the School of Sociology, University College Dublin, Ireland. He is the author of The Political Theory of Judith N. Shklar (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Sociology in Ireland (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

1. Introduction: A Two-Man Research Machine2. The Birth Pangs of American Democracy3. In Search of New Liberal Politics: Reconciling Equality with Liberty4. Republican by Necessity: The Revolution of 1848 and Beyond5. What Remains?