Aristocracy, Democracy, and Liberalism: Using the Tocquevillean Dichotomy to Understand Modern Liberalism

Abstract While previous scholarship has created anachronistic categories to analyze the political thought of notable liberals like John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, this article improves our understanding of liberalism by using an analytic category supplied by the writers themselves. Using Tocqueville’s aristocracy-democracy dichotomy, this paper demonstrates important differences in the social and political thought of Mill and Tocqueville previously overlooked. Specifically, by focusing on Mill’s reviews of Tocqueville’s work and correspondence between the two authors, this essay points out the differences between Mill’s “elitist democratic” liberalism and Tocqueville’s “aristocratic democratic” liberalism. This distinction has important implications for understanding the dominant forms of modern liberalism.