With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the concomitant demise of communism in the twentieth century which shed abroad a spirit of triumphalism through the West, came the euphoric impression that, "history had finally ended with the universal victory of Western liberal democracy as the final form ...
There aren't any actual definitions coined by Tocqueville for the 'key' terms he uses, so in "Democracy in America", we get more of a complex, yet focused, personified picture of America as a democratic system, or, as Ryan puts it, "a film rather than a photograph () a narrative of the movement that generated democracy". ... A crucial specification in the understanding of Tocqueville's philosophy of democracy in this particular context is that when Tocqueville talks about equality, he does not mean "equality of income, education or anything in part...