Democracy in America is in turn a thoughtful study of the United States and an examination of how the course of its democracy had diverged from de Tocqueville’s native France. It also acts as something of an instruction manual for statesmen on how to direct modern democracies. Researched while de Tocqueville was on commission by French King Louis-Phillipe to study the United States’ prison system, de Tocqueville travelled widely through New England, the South and Midwest, and saw a more peaceable, engaged democratic life there than at home.

De Tocqueville attested the strengths of American democracy were testament to the presence of religion in the political system which gave government the willpower of faith and a moral discipline to do right. ‘Despotism may govern without faith, but Liberty cannot.’ Like Rousseau he also recognised that local forms of government such as the New England townships were much more conducive to active citizenship, the people more involved in the law making, and that strong civic organisations like churches and voluntary groups cultured the characteristics like initiative and collaboration that democracy required of its citizens. If de Tocqueville saw American democracy as something that could and in time would be instituted in Europe in an inevitable historical shift toward equality, he warned against what he identified as American democracies chief vulnerability, the fear that exclusion from the ‘general will’ might engender mass conformity. Paradoxically, he thought, democracy constricted its citizens freedom of conscience.

The chief problem for De Tocqueville was that Rousseau’s notion of the ‘general will’ left an electorate susceptible to captivation by a charismatic leader, overcoming natural checks and balances. A further problem was that this ‘us/them’ distinction would draw more people to the majority view, creating a tyranny from the majority which deprived a minority of their natural liberty. De Tocqueville’s anxiety also focused upon some of the more outward seeming positive aspects of democracy; increased compassion for the common man and encouragement to pursue self-interested happiness. De Tocqueville saw these as leading us away from the old virtues like self-sacrifice and valour. We become generally sympathetic but personally restless or dissatisfied. There is a ‘singular melancholy’ about the life lived in democracy he felt. For Tocqueville it was the role of the statesmen, then as it is today, to exercise what free will they could muster to steer their countries through these moral and institutional flaws in the new world coming, which they must do with careful intelligent statecraft. And how might we apply De Tocqueville’s critique today? Could it be that the rise of digitisation while allowing for a more generalised compassion, more ‘democracy’ than ever – more videos, petitions, awareness campaigns than ever before, has once more left us ‘generally sympathetic but personally restless or dissatisfied’ while our saturation in this ‘softness’ has allowed other parts of our moral character to slip away?