Alexis de Tocqueville came to America from France in 1831. He was just 26 years old and had been sent by the French government to examine the American prison system. He did the job and published a book on it, but what captured his interest, and made his name, was the wider subject of democracy—how it worked so well in America when it had failed to work in France or, indeed, anywhere else in Europe.
A version of this article appeared in the January 2001 issue of Harvard Business Review.