Abstract

Contemporary theory of democracy can rightly and convincingly refer to Tocqueville for several reasons. Not only was the French aristocrat essentially the first author to describe and defend modern democracy in its complexity as a “state, society and way of life” (see Chap. 56), but he also understood it as “a dynamic form of society” in which “the system of popular sovereignty cannot be separated from democracy as a form of a society of equals” (Krause 2017, 17). The attempts to unravel the complexity and thematic variance within Tocqueville’s theory of democracy are, therefore, increasingly difficult to overlook (cf., e.g. Eisenstadt 1988; Masugi 1991; Nolla 1992; Manent 1993; Guellec 2004; Geenens/de Dijn 2007; Bluhm/Krause 2016). The author of the “masterpiece” De la démocratie en Amérique remains relevant not only because of his identification and analysis of the insoluble democratic “goal conflict” between freedom and equality or because he is at the beginning of an internationally comparative theory of democracy and a perspective that wants to constitutionally and morally contain unleashed popular sovereignty (Schmidt 2010, 113 ff., 486 ff., 489). His treatment of democracy as practical-political “spaces of experience”, which are closely related to the political constitution, the system of legal institutions, political culture and social morality (along with the respective relevant scientific disciplines) (Krause 2017, 17) continues to provide valuable impulses for the theoretical reflection of democracy.