But de Tocqueville wasn’t so interested in prisons and made it clear in letters to friends that his real reason for going was to study American morals, mentalities and economic and political processes. He got there courtesy of a grant from the French government, who wanted him to study the American prison system and compile a report from which it could learn some lessons. That’s why de Tocqueville went to America: to see what the future would be like. What, he wanted to know, would that be like? What would happen when societies that had been governed for generations by small aristocratic elites and who inherited their wealth and power, started to choose their leaders in elections in which pretty much the whole adult population could vote? But, de Tocqueville presciently believed, democracy was going to be the big idea of the future all over the world. After Waterloo, the Bourbon Kings came back – and while there were elections, the franchise was extremely limited. He’d been born in 1805, when Napoleon was the populist dictator of half of Europe. For de Tocqueville, democracy was a highly exotic and novel political option. Perhaps the best guide to some of these feelings, and to modern democracy in general, is a French 19th-century aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, who – in the early 1830s – travelled around the United States studying the political culture of the world’s first truly democratic nation and then compiled his thoughts in one of the greatest works of political philosophy, Democracy in America, published in France in 1835. We appear to be utterly committed to democracy and yet constantly disappointed and frustrated by it. And yet not to support democracy, to be frankly against democracy, is not a possible attitude either. We’re disappointed by the parties and sceptical that elections make a difference. But today, we’re likely to go through periods of feeling irritated and bored by our democratically-elected politicians. For generations across large parts of the world democracy was a secret, desperate hope.

We know that at key historical moments people have made profound sacrifices so that we can, every now and then, place a cross next to the name of a candidate on a ballot sheet. Democracy was achieved by such a long, arduous and heroic struggle that it can feel embarrassing – even shameful – to feel a little disappointed by it.

Alexis de tocqueville's