Tocqueville followed a method that strove for a theoretically grounded comparative analysis of political formations, but one in which each formation also had to be situated within deep and complex structures of their own historical evolution. he did not think of historically constituted political formations as mere cases of comparative theoretical types, or of variants within a type, as though one formation might just as easily be exchanged for another of the same type. Consequently his study of democratic institutions in the United States, as well as his comparative reflections on political institutions in France, is marked by detailed empirical observations that were drawn, as we would say today, from long and arduous fieldwork using a variety of textual and oral methods, followed by theoretical work seeking to draw sustainable formulations belonging to a general comparative order while respecting the historical specificities of each institutional form…