SOURCE: "Of Prophets and Prophecy," in Reconsidering Tocqueville's Democracy in America, edited by Abraham S. Eisenstadt, Rutgers University Press, 1988, pp. 192-206.

In this excerpt, Rodgers measures the accuracy of Tocqueville's predictions for twentieth-century America.

Democracy in America began as a piece of reportage, metamorphosed into a work in political philosophy, and became, at last, a book of prophecy. That is not the straightforward progression it may at first blush appear. The making of high theory out of reportage goes on every day, but prophecy is a rarer and more interesting phenomenon. Still more so is the canonization of prophets, the picking out of a handful of writers as gifted not merely with wisdom, or truth, or influence, but with prevision: the ability, not given to most mortals, to see in the tea leaves of their time a startlingly accurate picture of the future.

That status has been Tocqueville's...