NEW YORK (Bloomberg) — When a woman I knew wanted to upgrade the air conditioning in her apartment, I had my very own Tocqueville moment.The contractor put in a unit and got an earful: It wasn't cold enough. He put in another and got a temper tantrum. A new contractor eventually installed a unit the size of a truck.

In just the middle-class way Alexis de Tocqueville (1805- 1859) had described, my friend thought money purchased perfection. When it didn't she was very, very unhappy.

Tocqueville, the first writer to articulate the American preoccupation with money and status, is the subject of two new biographies: an "intellectual portrait" by the American essayist Joseph Epstein, one of the brief lives so popular with publishers today; and a hefty full-dress tome by the British scholar Hugh Brogan.

Tocqueville was, in fact, one of the first writers to study Americans at all. Whatever the aspect, he probably described it first, and better, somewhere in the two volumes of his "Democracy in America" (1835 and 1840).

"The passion for material well-being is essentially a middle-class passion," he wrote in Volume II. For aristocrats — and Tocqueville was one — material well-being "is not the purpose of life. It is a way of living."

The youngest son of a minor bureaucrat, Tocqueville grew up a child of the French Revolution. His family barely survived the Great Terror; his great-grandfather, a lawyer who defended Louis XVI, went to the guillotine.

Tocqueville lived through tumultuous events, most of them unfamiliar to American readers, which is why both of these books could have used a timeline. Educated as a lawyer, he experienced Bonaparte, the Bourbon restoration, the Revolution of 1830 (which deposed the Bourbons in favour of the House of Orleans), the Second Republic and Napoleon III's coup. And he was actively involved in politics for most of his life.

The trip to America in 1831 was concocted by Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, a fellow lawyer and pal, as a tour of the American penal system and, not incidentally, a good way to get out of the country for a while. It turned into a sociological investigation that ran for 271 days, covering 17 of the 24 states and 7,300 miles, along with a 15-day side trip to Canada.

Tocqueville left France a disappointed royalist. He returned a republican. "One thing is incontrovertibly demonstrated by America which I doubted until now: it is, that the middle classes can govern a State," he wrote in a notebook.

"I do not know if they could emerge with honour from really difficult political situations," he continued. "But they are equal to the everyday business of society. In spite of their petty passions, their incomplete education, their vulgarity, they can demonstrably supply practical intelligence, and that is enough."

What drove him and successive generations of Europeans and just about everyone else mad about Americans was the focus on moneymaking to the exclusion, it seemed, of all else. Americans never harnessed themselves to "some grander, more difficult undertaking," he wrote, but instead were obsessed with consumption and trivia — "They are forever seeking to pursue or hold on to pleasures that are as precious as they are incomplete and fleeting."

The two volumes of "Democracy in America" made Tocqueville's name. Yet there was a lot more to the writer, as Brogan shows. Tocqueville went on living for more than two decades after the first volume of "Democracy" was published. He began a history of the French Revolution and left behind a volume of recollections etched in acid, the residue of a failed life in politics.

Epstein's concise book may be better suited to the reader who doesn't want to invest 700-plus pages in a somewhat obscure French author "more quoted", as he puts it, "than read."

But Brogan not only tells a complicated story fully and clearly; he also engages the reader in all sorts of wonderful asides and observations. "She was one of the silliest princesses in all European history," he writes of one character. Another episode "compels the realisation that Tocqueville was a chatterbox".

And elsewhere: "Nationalism was the oxygen of 19th-century Europe, or should I say the influenza." Brogan's book is hard to put down.

Joseph Epstein's "Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy's Guide" is published by Atlas Books, a division of HarperCollins (208 pages, $21.95). Hugh Brogan's "Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life" is published by Yale University Press (724 pages, $35).