One of the most surprising intellectual turns of the twentieth century - a phenomenon that shows no signs of abating - was the revival of interest in the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville. In 1900, the French had almost forgotten Tocqueville, and Americans were beginning to find his famous portrait of early nineteenth century America of dubious relevance to their increasingly industrial immigrant nation. Yet in 2000, the Journal of Democracy asked public intellectuals to discuss issues affecting the future of democracy - the end of history, the problem of civil society, European federalism, race and ethnicity, the collapse of communism, war and foreign policy, international inequality, women and the family, even the democratic aesthetics of postmodernism - through Tocqueville's texts. The editors commented, ''one may say with little exaggeration: We are all Tocquevilleans now.'' Or, as Jon Elster has put it, “A generation ago it would have seemed absurd to see Tocqueville as the greatest political thinker of the nineteenth century. Nowadays, there is nothing unusual in this view.”

Tocqueville’s appeal has stemmed less from his ability to offer a grand theory of society and politics than from his curious role as intellectual provocateur, a writer who mysteriously appears to address the reader’s own concerns.3 Indeed, from the mid-twentieth century to the present, Tocqueville has manifested a unique power to bring certain political anxieties into sharper focus: anxieties stemming from efforts to sustain civic cultures that will support the practices of self-government; from attempts to create such cultures in unlikely circumstances; and, finally, from troubling questions about the need for unifying moral beliefs as the basis for democratic viability.