John Prideaux
speaker
643 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 19 Jun
John Prideaux’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
The Intelligence from The Economist · Tocqueville Road Trip: 1. Game of chance · 13 Jun 2026
podcast
They visited 17 of the 24 states and met hundreds of Americans from all walks of life.
Togville spoke to innkeepers, merchants, lawyers, and priests.
He sat in upscale drawing rooms in Manhattan, and by campfires with Ojibwe and Iroquois people.
He paddled down rivers, rode horses through mosquito filled forests, and met Andrew Jackson, America's seventh president at the White House.
Togville filled up fourteen notebooks and dozens of letters with his observations.
He became a sort of foreign correspondent and political analyst before either was really a thing.
Then he returned to France.
He'd never come back to America.
But those letters and notebooks became the basis of a work that remains perhaps the single most insightful thing ever written about the United States.
А бок култ демокрасі ін америка.
That book has been my companion since I first started writing about this country for The Economist.
I began reading it on the plane over from London to Washington for my first assignment as a US reporter in twenty thirteen.
Like anyone moving abroad to start a new job, I was both excited and nervous.
My biggest worry was whether a foreigner like me could have anything useful to say about a country they'd never lived in before.
Tocville offered some reassurance.
His radical insight was that America was much more than a country.
It was an idea.
And he saw that this idea was so powerful it would bend the arc of history.
People don't talk about the British or the French dream.
But two hundred years after Tocqueville, we still have a sense of the American one.
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