What did Tocqueville mean by "democracy"? -- Attacking the French tradition : popular sovereignty redefined in and through local liberties -- Democracy as modern religion -- Democracy as expectation of material pleasures -- Tocqueville as sociologist -- In the tradition of Montesquieu : the state-society analogy -- Counterrevolutionary traditionalism : a muffled polemic -- The discovery of the collective -- Tocqueville and the Protestantism of his time: the insistent reality of the collective -- Tocqueville as moralist -- The moralist and the question of l'honnte -- Tocqueville's relation to Jansenism -- Tocqueville in literature: democratic language without declared authority -- Resisting the democratic tendencies of language -- Tocqueville in the debate about literature and society -- The great contemporaries : models and countermodels -- Tocqueville and Guizot : two conceptions of authority -- Tutelary figures from Malesherbes to Chateaubriand.