Paul A Rahe.  Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010)

Excerpt:

 

In early November 1836, when Tocqueville wrote to Louis de Kergorlay to voice his frustration and his worries, he complained that “a multitude of ideas remains obscure in my mind,” ad he lamented that, in the absence of his childhood friend, he had no one residing nearby suitable for serving as a touchstone on which to test the validity of his institutions.  He was not, however, entirely bereft of intellectual companionship.  He did have company of a sort, and it was, he confessed, very valuable company indeed.  “There are,” he remarked, “three men with whom I live a little bit each day.”  His friend, were he present, would make a welcome fourth.  The three men—whom he named—were “Pascal, Montesquieu, and Rousseau.”

 

Although Tocqueville penned this striking line late in 1836, he almost certainly could have written it late in 1833 or in 1834—for the three great writers with whom he would later “live a little bit each day” are as much a presence in the first Democracy as they are in the second.  Throughout the 1830’s, and in subsequent years as well, these three men were for Tocqueville something akin to what his great-grandfather Malesherbes had always been: tutelary deities and household gods.

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