ABSTRACT
Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill and the late nineteenth century New Liberals, on whom this chapter concentrates, made major contributions to establishing a public philosophy for modern democracies. Alexis de Tocqueville was born in Paris in 1805, the eldest son of a French aristocratic family with whom, after the 1830 revolution which brought Louis Philippe to the French throne, he quarrelled. Modern democracy, the project that was born with the late-eighteenth-century American and French revolutions, was seen by Tocqueville as driven by the desire for the political sovereignty and equality of all men, yet moderated by caution, and the constitutional and other liberal principles it inherited. The principal political writings of John Stuart Mill, the second major founder of a public philosophic tradition of writing for democratic nations, were grounded on and permeated by a philosophy of history and a related conception of democracy.
