Publication of Democracy in America

Alexander De Tocqueville’s book Democracy in America, published in 1835, still stands as a seminal work on American social and political structures. De Tocqueville’s ideas about individualism and the risk of having a “tyranny of the majority” in a fully democratic society shaped Mill’s own belief in a representative democracy as superior to a pure one. In fact, Mill directly credits De Tocqueville, writing “this last change [in my political beliefs], which took place very gradually, dates its commencement from my reading, or rather study, of M. de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America” (Mill 104).