Insights on De Tocqueville's Democracy In America It has been said that a French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited the United States in the 1830's, "understood us" in a way that few observers (foreign and domestic) have. Furthermore, Tocqueville's Democracy in America is often cited by present-day critics because so many of the observations in it seem extraordinarily suitable even more than one hundred and fifty years later. Alexis de Tocqueville was born 1805 into a minor noble family, in which his grandfather had been guillotined during the French Revolution. He had come to the United States in 1831 to study the prison system, in which he