Peter Augustine Lawler, "The Restless Mind: Alexis de Tocqueville on the Origin and Perpetuation of Human Liberty."  (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993)

Excerpt:

I begin with socialism for a number of reasons.  Tocqueville saw the socialists as the most extreme and dangerous opponents to human liberty in his time.  His most pressing task as a political actor was to oppose socialist revolution.  He also opposed socialism as a political theorist, but with a remarkable appreciation of the greatness and theoretical strength of its challenge.  He understood the case for socialism far better than the socialists.  He also understood better than its other opponents how radical the challenge is.  His paradoxical thought was that it is precisely because socialism is such an extreme manifestation of human liberty that it opposes so extremely that liberty’s future.

In our time, the case against socialism seems more obvious than ever before.  The revolution of 1989 seems to have made it clear that socialism’s promise of a fundamental transformation of the human condition is a lie.  But our consideration of Tocqueville’s thought still must begin with the case for socialism.  What should particularly trouble us is his thought that human liberty would actually suffer in the absence of its challenge.  That thought is a proper beginning for reflection on how problematic and how difficult the defense of human liberty is in our time.

From a theoretical perspective, Tocqueville’s understanding of socialism reveals his most fundamental debt to Rousseau.  Tocqueville’s indebtedness to Rousseau has often been recognized, although mostly in terms of the similarity of their political solutions to the problems of democracy.  This practical debt has often been overstated.  Tocqueville, for example, emphatically did not reduce religion to civil religion.  Nor did he attempt to reduce the particularity of modern individuality to the general will.  But Tocqueville did understand the history of the West or of humanity in essentially the same way Rousseau described it in his Discourse on Inequality.  It is in light of history’s account of the movement away from natural order and goodness and towards human disorder and misery that Tocqueville accounted for socialist revolution.

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