Subsidiarity and Democracy in America
One of the more interesting things we discover about Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville (1805-1859) and his greatest work, Democracy in America (1835, 1840), is that the author — like Orestes Augustus Brownson (1803-1876) a generation latter in The American Republic (1866) — considered himself a Catholic writing as a Catholic. What surprises many people is to find out that both de Tocqueville and Brownson considered the American system (slavery excepted) to be the closest to “Catholic” political theory.