In political terms this meant that there was no point lamenting the loss of a bygone age of aristocracy and aristocratic values. Democracy was on the march and the best that could be hoped for was that it would conduct itself wisely. But it also meant that Tocqueville's liberalism was to remain unambiguously anti-bourgeois and that he was to retain a fear of the unruly masses. 

Jaume therefore reads Democracy in America as a text that "bristles with contradictory voices". Legitimists, counter-revolutionaries, liberal aristocrats, republicans, followers of the so-called doctrinaires, not to mention Tocqueville's staunchly monarchist family and friends, jostle for position in a "hidden dialogue". Consciously or not, Jaume tells us, Tocqueville saw America through the eyes of his illustrious uncle, François — René de Chateaubriand. Both favoured liberty while rejecting the power of money: both came to believe in God's presence in history. By contrast, Tocqueville's writing style was shaped by the moralists of the French 17th century. From this flowed his desire to resist a use of language that mirrored the confusion prevailing in democratic society. 

Most intriguing of all is Jaume's examination of Tocqueville's relation to Pascal and the broader tradition of Jansenism. What emerges is a picture of a man drawn by temperament and philosophical outlook to Jansenism's tragic vision of human finitude and the duality of soul and body. What Pascal portrayed as characteristic of the human condition, Jaume argues, was transposed by Tocqueville into a description of democratic society condemned to permanent agitation and restless anxiety. Like man himself, democracy cannot perceive its own good and is drawn fatally to the pursuit of material pleasures.

It was Pascal's Jansenist vision that Tocqueville deployed to highlight the unease and dissatisfaction at the heart of democratic society. The Pensées tell us that, as soon as we try to moor ourselves to a fixed point, it flees in eternal flight, the abyss reappearing beneath our feet. In a democracy, Tocqueville contends, that fixed point is seen as a condition of equality. However, no sooner does equality appear to be within our grasp than it too eludes us, the desire for equality only becoming more insatiable as we see it hovering in the near-distance. The more equal we are, the more the slightest inequality offends us.