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In the United States, Tocqueville notices this stable equation of liberty and equality that transcends the social towards the political into democracy - etymologically translated to 'the rule of the people' – and materializes into a system where "it is the majority that governs in the name of the people"4. However, since he, like many other political philosophers, believed that no political or legal system lacks a component in which "an absolute and unconstrained power"5 is concentrated and sovereignty, in the Hobbesian sense, is most definitely present, Tocqueville saw the American sovereign as being the majority. And although the majority is, not wrongly presumed, composed of peaceful citizens wanting the good of their country, by being omnipotent – assuming the role of the sovereign, the absolute power -, defences against it are nonexistent, so the majority in a democracy feels like it is not answerable to the minority, at which point one can speak of a 'despotic' system, or what Tocqueville calls "tyranny of the majority". Such a system tends to oppress the exercise of freedom of thought and to inhibit social involvement, compromising liberty in the process. .
The authority of the majority, thus, is the threat we should be concentrating on in answering this question, for it is the one most specific to modern democracies that Tocqueville analyzes in "Democracy in America", and as we will see, the one most powerful because of its means. Before being able to discuss why Tocqueville thinks the dominant authority of the majority is such a dangerous threat to democratic liberty and prior to highlighting what he deems as preventive measures and conditions that might ensure the preservation of liberty in democracies, an attempt at compiling the meanings he gives to 'democracy' and 'liberty' and attention to how they are connected is necessary for the sake of an accurate use of the concepts in this particular context.