Herein lies democracy's greatest peril. Democratic man would give up liberty in favour of equality and the promise of material plenty. Here too, according to Jaume, are found "the two great ideas that animated all of Tocqueville's thought": the resurgence of despotism and the advent of equality. And it is precisely the prominence given to these two themes by Tocqueville that explains why we still read Democracy in America and why we do so with such profit. Tocqueville, with greater clarity than anyone before him, saw that the equality of conditions typical of democratic society could give rise to a new form of despotism. 

Tocqueville also saw that America had contrived ways to counter these tendencies: religion and the family as checks upon individualism; administrative decentralisation and the separation of powers: "self-interest properly understood". All served to maintain a flourishing local life and thus to preserve liberty. 

Of course, Tocqueville did not intend that America should be seen as a model to be copied slavishly. Nor, Jaume concludes, did Tocqueville need to observe the vitality of the New England townships to appreciate the dangers of centralisation. As an aristocratic liberal, family tradition alone would have taught him how an absolutist monarchy could suck the life out of a country.

Why then did Tocqueville write Democracy in America? No clearer answer is to be found than in a letter written by Tocqueville to Silvestre de Sacy in 1840, usefully printed as an appendix to this volume. It reads as follows: "My purpose in writing [my] book was to reveal the frightening prospects in store for our contemporaries . . . To show . . . that in order to prevent this equality, which we rightly hold dear, from becoming the leprosy of the human race, one must work tirelessly to sustain the flight of ideas, to lift souls toward — and — to show that in the democratic age that is just beginning, political liberty is not only beautiful but also necessary for nations to become great and even to remain civilised."

Lucien Jaume's impeccable scholarship helps us better to understand how Tocqueville attained this goal.