Abstract
Friendship was very important to Alexis de Tocqueville, and he wrote a great deal about it. He found in friendship all the qualities of heart and honesty that were in stark contrast to the cold, calculating, contractual nature of politics and the modern world. Despite having only a small circle of friends, Tocqueville was capable of developing passionate and enduring friendships. At the same time, he was too complicated and candid to be an easy friend. He demanded a lot from his friends, his family and especially his marriage at times proving difficult for him. His deep uncertainties about identity, along with the psychic troubles that consumed him, affected all aspects of his intimate life, especially his marriage. Tocqueville's relationship to the aristocracy was characterized by ambiguities that offered him no secure sense of community. He longed for a morally satisfying intimate society, but much in his book Democracy in America anticipates the era of intentional communities as well as the general retreat in democratic societies to more intimate milieus of family, friendship, and love.
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