Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill on Religion

Alexis De Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill were friends, correspondents, and mutual admirers of each other's writings. Tocqueville considered Mill's reviews as among the most sympathetic and empathetic that he received. Mill acknowledged Tocqueville's influence on his thought regarding both democracy and majorities. Both writers, like so many nineteenth-century intellectuals, were deeply involved in the public life of their respective nations. Both men have been termed by Alan Kahan as "aristocratie liberals."1 Both, as Jennifer Pitts has recently reminded us, were also liberal imperialists.2 Works of both writers within their own lifetimes entered the canon of liberal political theory and have remained there to this day. Both have long have been taught in college and university curriculums on both sicles of the Atlantic. Scholars continue to find both Mill and Tocqueville figures of enormous complexity and subtlety about whom it is difficult to make broad general statements.