Olivier Zunz is the James Madison Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Changing Face of Inequality, 1982, Making America Corporate, 1990, Why the American Century?, 1998, Philanthropy in America: A History, 2012, and most recently The Man Who Understood Democracy. The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville, 2022. He is also the editor of Reliving the Past, 1985, The Landscape of Modernity, 1992, and Social Contracts under Stress, 2002. His work on Alexis de Tocqueville also includes editing The Tocqueville Reader, 2002, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, 2004, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in America, 2010, and Tocqueville’s Recollections (1850-1851), 2016.
Olivier Zunz has been a Guggenheim fellow and has held visiting professorships at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and the Collège de France, among other appointments abroad. He lives with his wife in Charlottesville, Virginia.