Tocqueville's Jeffersonian Reading of the Federal Constitution

• In Event: The Federalist and American Constitutional Development

Abstract

This paper explains how Tocqueville praised the Constitution as a Federalist victory that would temper what he saw as the inevitable rise of Jeffersonian and then Jacksonian democracy but, nevertheless, how Tocqueville offered, in many important respects, a strangely more Jeffersonian and Jacksonian reading of the Constitution. In addition to discussing Tocqueville on the question of presidential representation, Bailey's paper examines how Tocqueville's reading of Federalist No. 39 was shaped by Jefferson and his followers.

Author

• Jeremy D. Bailey, University of Oklahoma