We live in the democratic age. So wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, in 1835, in his magisterial work, Democracy in America . This did not mean, as so many have believed after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, that the political apparatus of democracy would sweep the world. Rather, Tocqueville meant that as each nation left behind the vestiges of its aristocracy, life for its citizens or subjects would be increasingly isolated and lonely.
In America, more than a half century of scholarship has explored and c…
