John C. Koritansky. Alexis de Tocqueville and the New Science of Politics (Durham, NC: Carolina Acadmic Press, 1986)

Excerpt:

In this book, I will try to describe and evaluate Tocqueville’s Democracy in America as a comprehensive teaching about politics.  Perhaps the best shorthand description of what Tocqueville is trying to do is to say that his Democracy has the same breadth of aim as has Montesquieu in the Esprit des Lois.  It could even be said that Tocqueville is rewriting Montesquieu’s work, on the basis of Tocqueville’s claim to have discovered that the many different animating principles among the variety of regimes that Montesquieu had studied been displaced by the one overpowering animus in modern society, i.e., the love of equality.  The meaning of the love of equality is the central issue in his work: its roots in human nature, its various forms, its various political consequences, and the latitude it allows to the modern statesman are what Tocqueville tries to illustrate.  Almost certainly it was Rousseau who taught Tocqueville to see the root of the love of equality in human nature and to see its centrality for political life.  My whole interpretation, then, might be summed up by saying that Tocqueville attempts to rewrite Montesquieu’s political science by way of an extension of Rousseau’s reinterpretation of human nature.

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