Tocqueville's presentation of the doctrine of interest rightly understood has been misconstrued because the chapter in which it is presented has not been read in context. That context is volume 2, chapter 2 of Democracy in America, where Tocqueville addresses the effect of the movement toward democracy on the heart, and the disorders specific to democracy that affect the heart's functioning. Read in context, the doctrine of interest rightly understood concerns the relation among interest, pride, and love as part of a wider political-about the relation among interest, pride, and love in a wider political-moral strategy of resisting the illiberal excesses of egalitarianism. The doctrine of interest rightly understood serves to prefect the heart-enlarging functions of America's triple inheritance of free local political institutions, religion, and the family as counterweights against the democratic impulse toward egalitarian consistency.
