How is this relevant to narratives? Any narrative that entails and establishes such an order that provides a sense of particularity, and engages a human being amongst his democratic fellows, must be termed aristocratic. Narratives that give a particular distinction to people and detail a concrete set of behavior - a set of responsibilities - towards others, thus have the power to create cohesion in a group that feels addressed by that order. Forces of cohesion derive from the responsibilities of a particular place in an order relating to particular other people. In other words, the narrative can provide a home, solidarity with others, and as such, social cohesion. We shall now observe some decisive features of narratives.
    Can a whole democratic people be held together by an aristocratic narrative? This narrative would necessarily need to provide a sense of particularity to its single member, and it seems possible in the form of patriotism. Tocqueville distinguishes between an instinctive, and a well-considered patriotism, the latter being the "more rational", proper form of patriotism (or 'public spirit') of a democracy: "less generous, perhaps less ardent, but more creative and more lasting, it is engendered by enlightenment, grows by the aid of laws and the exercise of rights, and in the end becomes, in a sense, mingled with personal interest. A man understands the influence which his country's well-being has on his own; he knows the law allows him to contribute to the production of this well-being, and he takes an interest in his country's prosperity, first as a thing useful to him and then as something he has created."   - We see here a great example of a narrative - the account of an order - that has come out of the Enlightenment and corresponds with democratic institutions such as laws and rights: it is the narrative of the self-understanding of a rational citizen within the democratic order of his narrative; at the same time, this form of patriotism relies on the feeling of the particularity of the citizen, and on his assumption of his responsibilities within the universal order of things. It is a secular, rational and interest-oriented narrative that provides cohesion among all who are comprehended within the narrative.
    What are the weaknesses of the patriotic narrative? As Tocqueville himself has observed, it needs the participation of citizen "taking a share in its government." Patriotism both entails the universal democratic values that allow for this participation, and the particular forms in which these universal values are actualizes. If people loose sight of their influence - if they loose their particularity in the universal order of things -, patriotism, the public narrative, is endangered. Tocqueville saw a solution in federalism, with states and especially towns accounting for the particular needs of people, and the federal level representing universal values. However, without making a big argument here, one can today observe the growing centralization of federal power, and the decline in voter-turnout in federal elections. One is also observing the rise of parochial ethnic narratives in the face of the meta-narrative of citizenship in America. I suggest that this is due to the fact that a purely political narrative, stripped more and more off its historical moral and 'good' contents by people like Rawls who proclaim politics a 'freestanding political conception of justice', is loosing its power to engage the particularity of people who define themselves not over a political narrative alone.
    Does this mean that local, moral, ethnic or religious narratives may have an advantage over secular state-building narratives? They certainly have more power to address an individual in his particularity by providing a cultural, temporal, and often spatial  transcendence of the governing McConsumer-culture of a McDonaldized World of McCititzens consuming the images and the McNews-nuggets items in USA Today.  If Charles Taylor's essay on "The Politics of Recognition"  taught one thing, it is that 'attention must be paid' to particularities.
    Where do we go from here - particular chaos or universal community? The forces of globalization, and the power of the longing of individuals who want to be recognized in their particularity leads us in both directions. We will have to learn how to weave our more particular narratives into more inclusive meta-narratives. Of special importance may be - and this is the last great insight Tocqueville has left us on narratives -  the religious narrative.
    Why is the religious narrative the ultimate narrative? If democratic institutions, such as associations, gather people together in a practical sense, then narratives gather people together in a more intellectual as well as an emotional sense. An example of a narrative that draws people out of themselves in a practical communal sense (in worship and at their temple), in an intellectual sense (through the study of scripture), in an emotional sense (through addressing a spiritual need for love, and possibly fear) and a spatial and temporal sense is the religious narrative, rightly named by Tocqueville as an important aristocratic residue. All three monotheistic religions address the particularity of the individual and ask for a certain behavior on her part in connection to the universal order of things , and have been successful for a long time: "Faith is the only permanent state of mankind."  Tocqueville names three important functions of religion: to provide dogmas that serve as basic foundations; to draw people's minds away from the daily interest towards the immaterial order of things; and to satisfy a sense of mystery. The example of Jewish religion shall illuminate these three claims.
    Why do we need dogma? The religious dogma Tocqueville has in mind provide people with the most basic, ground-laying assumptions on life, and therefore ought to be fixed.

"Men cannot do without dogmatic beliefs, and it is even most desirable that they have them. I would add here that religious dogmas seem to me the most desirable of all... There is hardly any human action, however private it may be, which does not result from some very general conception men have of God, of His relations with the human race, and of the nature of their soul, and of their duties to their fellows. Nothing can prevent such ideas from being the common spring from which all else originates. It is therefore of immense importance to men to have fixed ideas about God, their souls, and their duties toward their creator and their fellows, for doubt of these first principles would leave all their actions to chance and condemn them, more or less, to anarchy and impotence."