Publius e Tocqueville: la “nuova scienza politica” e il “feudalesimo americano”

While scholars have generally focused attention on the analogies between the political perspective of The Federalist and that of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, this essay aims to highlight the theoretical differences between the two works. Alexander Hamilton theorized the need for a strong national executive power as an embodiment of a disinterested rationality; James Madison justified federal power in defense of freedom and property from possible interference by states’ democratic legislative assemblies. Tocqueville’s vision was the opposite: the French author looked to America as an experiment in democracy. In this perspective, his “science of politics” consisted in giving value to the past, recognizing a major source in “American feudalism”, understood as the dispersion of power in the multiplicity of institutions and local associations of Puritan America.