Democracy and its enemies

Since the French Revolution, democracy has often been contested in its representative form, and has never completely erased the authoritarian aspirations of certain schools of thought. Yet direct democracy has not escaped criticism. 

Modern democracy was born with the advent of the declarations of human rights, but with varying degrees of enthusiasm. With the rise of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, it was not democracy but individual liberty that was at the forefront of most philosophers' minds. Would liberty and democracy be irrevocably irreconcilable? Tocqueville will show that there is no opposition in principle between the two, albeit under certain conditions, which he will like to theorize, by looking at the Americans. Americans who, precisely