Democracy in the Balance: The Role of Statist, Liberal, and Republican Institutions in Tocqueville's Theory of Liberty

In recent years scholars have challenged the traditional interpretation of Tocqueville as an unproblematic liberal theorist and emphasized the "strange" and "elusive" qualities of his work. I extend this line of inquiry to Tocqueville's institutional theory of democratic liberty. Tocqueville saw the cultivation and preservation of liberty as dependent upon a balance among statist, liberal, and republican institutional arrangements because any one alone tended to lead to some form of tyranny. Recent "Tocquevillian" proposals for democratic reform fail to appreciate the full complexity of Tocqueville's institutional insights, with potentially dire consequences for democratic liberty.