This book has been a long time in the making. While working on it, most often on two continents, we have had the good fortune to accumulate many debts to a great number of persons and institutions, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge them here.

The inspiration for this project came from two essays by Françoise Mélonio and Hugh Brogan, who convinced us of the importance of studying the evolution of Tocqueville's views on America after 1840. We initially set out to write a paper on this topic which we presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, August 31–September 3, 2003. A substantially revised version of our essay was published as “The Third Democracy: Tocqueville's View of America after 1840” in American Political Science Review, 98: 3 (2004): 391–404. Subsequently, Ed Parsons of Cambridge University Press encouraged us to develop our article into a larger project and patiently worked with us over the past years to improve the contents of this volume.

The book project that evolved out of our original article underwent significant transformations over time and greatly benefited from the advice we received from many distinguished Tocqueville scholars in the United States and Europe.