He devotes a great deal of time to describing the Puritans and their relatively enlightened political culture and social homogeneity. In the first part Tocqueville describes America’s geography: its large continent, Native populations, and vast opportunities for productive agriculture and European settlement. He states plainly, “Therefore it is not only to satisfy a curiosity, otherwise legitimate, that I have examined America I wanted to find lessons there from which we could profit” (12). He is painfully aware that the age of aristocracy has passed, but in Europe it has not been fully replaced with a viable alternative. In his introduction Tocqueville emphasizes that his main preoccupation is America’s example as a functioning democracy. The first volume is based on Tocqueville’s nearly yearlong sojourn in the United States, ostensibly to study its prisons and prison reform.
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