Abstract

The essay is a critical note of Lucien Jaume's "Tocqueville. Les sources aristocratiques de la liberté". Of this intellectual biography - that goes beyond Toqueville's texts, looking at his intellectual sources - Giordano focuses her reading on two main questions. On the one hand, the problem of authority, that is not confined to the power of the State but emerges also from the family, the civil society and religion. On the other hand, the question of democracy and how the conception of equality as a force that levels society determines the originality of Tocqueville's liberalism and of his reflection about despotism.