Not long ago, I read de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. I am certain that if you took, on the one hand, an old-order Romantic and, on the other hand, what de Tocqueville predicts will happen to literature with the development of democracy—taking the common man as its subject, having a strong interest in the future, using more realist vocabulary—you would get me.
– French novelist Michel Houellebecq, in an interview with Susannah Hunnewell for The Paris Review, characterizing himself as belonging to a literary and intellectual tradition that includes de Tocqueville among other Core authors — elsewhere, he counts Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky among his influences.
