A professor used to remark that “you can say that Hobbes is about dairy farming if you back it up.” Laura Janara writes that Tocqueville's Democracy in America is about embryology, the feminine and masculine, gestation, birth, and gender relations, and she backs it up.

It is easy to state the obvious—that Democracy in America is about the dangers of tyranny, social and political control, and a “big brother” paternalistic state that takes on the quality of a parent, but, in Tocqueville's own words “none but attentive and clearsighted” persons see the subconscious themes of gender and gestation undulating below the surface of his social science treatise. Janara treats us to the revelation that Democracy in America is really about passion and power, not only a battle between the sexes but a web of relations between parent and child, mother and offspring, male and female, that demonstrates the interplay not only between the “birth” of states and political cultures and their progenitors but also within the state in its various aspects and manifestations.

While we might hear neutral social science observations, Janara hears the cries of labor, those of birth and the voice of the mother (Europe) and child (America.) Aristocracy is female, while democracy is childlike, the so-called infant democracy (p. 39). She outlines Tocqueville's gendering of the concepts of equality and liberty and explores the idea that “liberty is a fragile female” (p. 82) while equality is a robust one and a “symbolically female replacement for maternal aristocracy” (p. 82).

Janara takes us, chapter by chapter, through “Birth and Growth” (chap. 2, including embryo, gestation, orphan), “Adolescence and Maturity” (chap. 3), “Money, Marriage and Manly Citizenship” (chap. 4) to “Impotence and Infantilism” (chap. 5, including hypermasculine individualism and female administration) and “Democracy's Family Values” (chap. 6) concluding with “Family, Gender and Democratic Maturity.” If Europe and the ancien regime are representations of motherhood and the feminine order (Janara cites Marianne as the symbol of the French republic on p. 13), democracy in America represents the unruly child, full of chaos and immaturity.

This is a new approach. Why have we not noticed it before? Why have we not noticed that behind Tocqueville's discussions of “Tyranny of the Majority” and the mild, bureaucratic despotic tyranny he fears will overtake the Americans are a wealth of images of male–female, parent–child, gender relations, the passions, and sex roles?

According to Janara, it is because “the gendered and familial imagery that undergirds the text is part of the intimate relationship we have with this book; we accept the images so readily that we have not noticed them” (p. 7). She suggests that even Tocqueville is unaware of this subconscious Freudian undercurrent, saying that “Tocqueville, like all of us, inescapably says more than he intends to say in his text” (p. 34) and that “Tocqueville performs consciously as a kind of psychologist” but his gender images and metaphors are “largely unconsciously rendered” (p. 33). Using Dorothy Dinnerstein's work (The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise, 1976) to explore Democracy in America is useful because, according to Janara, it “enables a fresh view of the social structures that permeate modern democracy” (p. 27) and because “[d]eploying psychoanalytic theory to grasp the psychic energies at play in the gender economy of Tocqueville's text is valuable for what it illuminates broadly about power, authority, and submission” (p. 27). Janara also relies on “object-relations theory,” noting that “Tocqueville is very much a theorist of relations himself” (p. 23), and so “[t]he object-relations approach thus impresses as a particularly appropriate interpretative framework for Democracy in America” (p. 23).

Janara's analysis sets us on a different track that leads to a parallel or cognate reading to the traditional one. The author understands this and frequently refers back to Tocqueville's theories of aristocracy, mild despotism, religion, atomization, and the importance of associations in explicating her thesis. This is particularly useful as it gives us another layer of interpretation and another level of understanding that complements conventional readings. Thus, she provides us with a key to Tocqueville's subconscious thoughts based on his language, which is rich in the imagery of familial and gender relationships. She does this in a nuanced, original and convincing way.

So you can say Democracy in America is about gender, gestation, birth, and the passions if you back it up. Laura Janara backs it up. More important, she gets it right. These are underlying themes that elucidate the more obvious and well-worn ones of aristocracy versus democracy, the great chain of traditional society including the web of obligations that was feudal Europe, the importance of associations in America, the love of equality as a watchword of the age, and the mild bureaucratic “road to servitude.” In short, Freud would applaud Janara's approach in Democracy Growing Up and Tocqueville would appreciate the meticulous textual reading that inspires it.