Yet Tocqueville’s reservations, his criticisms, his forebodings are not shared by Mill, who in a letter confessed to Tocqueville with some understatement that his article is “a shade or two more favorable to democracy than your book.”21 Mill believes, for example, that the tyranny of the majority that Tocqueville warns of in the first volume of Democracy in America could be avoided “if the people entertained the right idea of democracy.”22 To Tocqueville’s remark that the American people cheerfully exclude the ablest men from government, Mill responds that great talents are not ordinarily
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