Democracy in America

Alexis de Tocqueville's study grew out of nine months traveling through the United States that began in 1831, when the French government sent him and Gustave de Beaumont to examine American prisons, a task that, by his later account, became a pretext to study American society. Published in Paris in two volumes, it examines a democratic revolution that Tocqueville believed had been under way for centuries as conditions grew more equal and aristocracy faded. He notes how American government and Puritan religious history shaped an entrepreneurial and fairly egalitarian culture, and criticizes what a society built on social mobility and restlessness costs in moral, spiritual, artistic and interpersonal terms. It ranks as an early classic of political science and sociology.

Patrick Collison puts it on his Bookshelf list.