“The Best Help I Could Find to Understand Our Present”: François Furet’s Antirevolutionary Reading of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America

Narratives of democracy: A call for historical studies

“…There was, however, in most European countries a growing feeling that democracy in some way would be a part of modern politics; an 'idea of democracy as the inevitable condition of modern man' emerged, as François Furet paraphrased Tocqueville's fundamental intuition. 14 It is, however, an important insight from recent research that this change occurred, from country to country, at different times, in different ways, and among different political and social groups. In Spain and France, for instance, there was a rich language of democracy spoken by important social groups already before 1848, but in other countries democracy worked its way into modern political language much slower.…”