Americans generally quote Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” as a way of patting themselves on the back. Tocqueville’s first volume, published at the end of 1834 after a nine-month tour of the New World, was the first great study of American institutions and political culture. It declared the American Revolution the triumph of “a mature and considered taste for liberty, not a vague and indefinite instinct for independence.”
But there is another way to read Tocqueville. If Volume 1 laid out what Americans had made of democracy, Volume 2, published six years later, laid out what democracy had made of Americans. This was a bleaker subject. Self-rule had its paradoxes, Tocqueville showed. Equality could come at the price of intellectual independence. And if one man was just as worthy of a political voice as the n
