Born roughly a hundred years apart, Tocqueville (b. 1805) and Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908) lived through radically different historical moments. Tocqueville experienced the aftershocks of the French Revolution and the political turbulence of the first half of the nineteenth century as France veered from the Restoration of 1815 to the July Monarchy of 1830 to the Revolution of 1848 and finally the Second Empire of 1851. He attributed the cause for this turbulence to an irresistible revolution whereby a democratic world substituted itself for an aristocratic one. Although this global movement toward the equality of conditions has long been recognized as Tocqueville's central preoccupation, scholarship in the past 20 years has increasingly been interested in Tocqueville's support for France's incipient colonization of Algeria in his writings from the 1830s and 1840s.

Lévi-Strauss likewise lived through violent times. He witnessed the cataclysm of two world wars, the establishment of the Fourth Republic in France in 1946, the Algerian War beginning in 1954, and the tumult of student rebellion in 1968. Although Lévi-Strauss focused on culture and the nature of the human mind, his mature thought is nonetheless deeply enmeshed with the political challenge to European colonialism and speaks to a postcolonial France. We might say that both Tocqueville and Lévi-Strauss were concerned with democratic revolution; however, where Tocqueville's thought focused on the equality of conditions in the West, Lévi-Strauss's work challenged the superiority of Western thought and broke down the barrier between what had been considered primitive and civilized. As bookends to the French colonization of Algeria, Lévi-Strauss's most famous work, Tristes Tropiques, was written in 1955 as France's grip on Algeria was being loosened through a bloody war of liberation, while Tocqueville's Democracy in America was published in two volumes (1835 and 1840) during the incipient phase of the French colonization of Algeria.

Comparing these two thinkers brings the conceptualization of empire in French thought into sharper focus and allows us to see the global implications of the Americas from two different perspectives: Tristes Tropiques from Brazil and the Global South and Democracy in America from the United States and the North. This comparison also yields a number of insights on both intellectuals, when we make an effort to observe common traits, that is, to discern anthropological features in Tocqueville and democratic features in Lévi-Strauss.