A generation ago it would have seemed absurd to see Tocqueville as the greatest political thinker of the nineteenth century. Nowadays, there is nothing unusual in this view. Nevertheless, not all who agree on this judgment will necessarily accept my reasons for holding it. To my way of thinking, it is not possible to extract general and wide-ranging theories from his work; or perhaps I should say that whatever such theories we can find are not very interesting. In his writings, the details are of greater interest than the whole, the reasoning is more compelling than the conclusions, and the partial mechanisms more robust than the general theories. In arguing for this evaluation, I shall proceed to a close reading of the texts with a view to singling out the topoi, Gestalten or patterns of his thought – causal mechanisms or mechanism-generating frameworks that remain remarkably fertile and novel, one hundred and fifty years after they were first formulated. I shall focus on his analysis of psychological mechanisms, leaving the analysis of more aggregate processes for another occasion.

Tocqueville mastered three different levels of analysis with a success that has never been equalled. In Democracy in America, the framework is that of equilibrium analysis. Here, Tocqueville aims at depicting democratic institutions and the psychology of democratic citizens as they can be observed when “democratic society is finally firmly established (assise)” (DA, p. 628).