A major conference on Tocqueville’s Democracy in America was held from January 23 to 26, 1985, at Claremont, California. The meeting, sponsored by the Claremont Institute and funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, was the second annual conference in a larger project, Novus Ordo Seclorum, directed by Ken Masugi and designed by the Institute to celebrate the American Bicentennial. The Tocqueville Conference, which gathered as participants some three dozen scholars from the United States, France, Germany, and Thailand, also honored the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Democracy and served to demonstrate the continuing fascination and liveliness of Tocqueville’s book as a commentary on American society and culture.
