The underlying theme of this study is the notion of local democracy. This notion rests on a fundamental ideal of political liberty. Tocqueville not only grasped the significance of this ideal, but also many of its contradictions, which manifested themselves in the course of the political developments of the nineteenth century. The idea of local democracy was, to a considerable extent, undermined by the processes of centralisation and modernisation, as well as by the rationalisation of political authority typical of the modern period. And yet this ideal rose again from the ashes at the end of the 1960s, and in Western countries, especially France and Britain, produced a set of attitudes which was widely shared. ‘Participatory democracy’ was very much the vogue, and if the expression, with its abstract tone, is more familiar to the French than to the British, it nonetheless became one of the major preoccupations of the great commissions on government reform which were set up in both countries (in Britain the Redcliffe–Maud Commission in 1969, and the Layfield Committee in 1976; in France the Peyrefitte Commission in 1975 and the Guichard Commission in 1976) aimed, amongst their objectives, at adapting the system of local government to new democratic circumstances. In Britain, it had been thought that the effect of the new system introduced in 1974 would be to increase citizen participation at the local level, to improve the quality of the elected representatives, and to build up new communities which would in many instances bring together the town and the countryside.