“I have so many feelings and ideas in common with the English that for me England has become a second intellectual home.” So wrote de Tocqueville to one of his English friends, when signs of Napoleonic despotism reappeared in the troubled French skies and alarmed liberals began to worry about final issues and coming dangers.
England and its historical pattern of behavior, its “moeurs”, its institutions and above all the peculiar rhythm of its social development, played a most important part in the general formation of de Tocqueville's thought. The Anglo-Saxon world was in his eyes a fairly bright spot in a gloomy and unhappy European picture, a world from which one could occasionally gather some valuable guiding principles as to the understanding of the continental malady and its possible cure.