Alexis de Tocqueville was among the first to grapple with socioeconomic equality as a necessary outcome of emerging societies, most famously Jacksonian America. For Guy Sorman, ‘Democracy in America is, in fact, a meditation on how the contradiction between equality and liberty might be overcome, or at least eased, by American society’s civil and religious institutions—schools of self-governance in Tocqueville’s famous interpretation.’

Tocqueville missed industrialization and underplayed slavery. ‘…he sees a civilized man as someone who is attached to the land and cultivates it, transforming it by his labor and making it more valuable—the American pioneer, in other words. Tocqueville has the greatest respect for such an entrepreneur of the soil. Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman would agree: if I did not fear the anachronism, I would qualify Tocqueville, for all his lack of focus on industrial transformation, as a free marketeer.’

Concerned also with French Algeria and British India, Tocqueville is a liberal struggling to enshrine checks on the state: ‘A democratic government is such a dangerous machine that, even in America, we are obliged to take a great many precautions against the errors and the passions of democracy: two chambers, veto by governors, and judicial institutions.’

‘Nations in our day can do nothing to prevent conditions in their midst from being equal. But it is up to them to decide whether the equality of conditions leads to servitude or to freedom, to enlightenment or to barbarism, to prosperity or to misery’, Tocqueville added.

Having earned precious fame, his later studies of the 1848 revolution and the fall of the ancien regime, as well as his refusal to participate in Bonapartist politics, meant his views were those of the bypassed aristocrat, according to Carl Schmitt. He was restored only in the 1960s by Francois Furet and Raymond Aron.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/tocqueville-then-and-now

Mansfield, conversely to Schmitt and Brogan, sees Tocqueville as alive to democracy’s sources of liberty in aristocracy. In a review of Lucien Jaume’s

Tocqueville: The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty

, Mansfield points to nobles as establishing desire for self-rule, trial by jury, associations as derived from public obligations of feudal lords, and most prominently, desire for greatness and acclaim independent of the state. Tocqueville was alive to these and their dynamics, whereas Jaume sees only writing for Tocqueville’s contemporaries, only context and commonplace, leading to nostalgia for aristocracy, thereby discounting the author’s fundamental creativity.