Edward Banfield.  "The Illiberal Tocqueville" in Here the People Rule.  (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1991)

Excerpt:

Democracy in America has been called the greatest book ever written about one country by a citizen of another.  It is certainly the greatest book ever written by anyone about America.  After 150 years there is hardly a page that does not open the reader’s eyes to the larger implications of some familiar fact.  It may appear perverse of me, then, to use this occasion to discuss not Tocqueville’s illuminating view of America but rather his—as I think—unilluminating one of the nature and future of democracy.  My excuse for doing so is not that this chapter celebrates the bicentennial of the Constitution (which is based on principles quite contrary to Tocqueville’s).  Rather, it is that Tocqueville considered the nature and future of democracy to be his real subject.  “America, he wrote to J.S. Mill, “was only the frame, my picture was Democracy.”

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