But did Tocqueville understand the deeper search for identity and belonging in those who join a parochial pack in search for truth? Yes, he did. The personal feeling of belonging to a particular flock, the distinction of particular habits and recipes, the distance from the ordinary other people trampling through the underwood in search of truth, is not a democratic but an ‘aristocratic’ condition. The flight into particular identities that provide sense beyond the lonely search - the songs, the campfire, the ritual that make for cozy hours in the lonely wilderness - is a reaction to the essentially lonely, withdrawn and individualistic condition of democracy. Aristocratic residues, about which we will have to speak more of later, provide shelter for the lonely democratic man. Tocqueville feared that democratic people would lose their distinct selves in the equality of the crowd, and reminded his readers of aristocratic institutions (he named family, property and wealth, the practice of law, and religion) that elevate an individual above the crowd, and give her the possibility of greatness. I will make the argument in this paper that the function of aristocratic institutions - providing a sense of stability, distinctiveness and linkage - can be provided by any order that addresses the individual as a particular, and places her within a universal order of things. In that sense, Tocqueville did understand those who join a parochial pack in search for their own particular distinctive identity above the universally faceless crowd, though he primarily thought of religious, rather than ethnic (or other) identities.
    Is Tocqueville's democratic condition the post-modern condition, his answer of aristocratic institutions and participatory habits an answer to postmodernity? In many essential respects, yes. As I have described, postmodernism is often associated with the intellectual awareness of a kaleidoscopic existence, but one must not have read books by sociologists  and philosophers to feel the impact of democratic disconnectedness, "where each man is narrowly shut up in himself", withdrawn from the world, unaware of what transcends one's secular, self-reliant existence, and feel this disconnectedness as a loss. We will discuss the history of man's democratic loneliness in the context of a history of equality, democracy and narratives later on.
    Is the perception of confusion in the underwood not just a professoral hobby-horse that has no impact on the real world? No. Indeed, with Tocqueville, one can make the argument that the largely lonely intellectual hustle-bustle in the underwood of the mind in search for meaning is the real undercurrent underlying the jostling and shoveling of the lonely crowd on the surface of the plain green meadows of liberal Western democracies, which falsely understands happiness to be meaning . The search for sense was what started the Enlightenment project - "the project of an independent rational justification of morality" according to Alasdair MacIntyre  -, and for sense we still search for today. But as Tocqueville had anticipated, this search might be somewhat misguided in a time where money is the yardstick of success, where a modernity has constructed a Weberian iron cage, where politics starts treating citizens as consumers, and where markets are becoming the primary forces in our lives, focusing our aspirations on flexibility and mobility, human features suited to market success, but reflecting an uprooted, fragmented personality.
    Having outlined the postmodern context of this paper - what can we expect Tocqueville to tell to a liberal democracy in postmodern times? Tocqueville offers an anthropology, and a history of human aspirations, as well as many helpful insights into democratic conditions that allow for the effective assessment of postmodern phenomena, and for a new proposal for the establishment of civil society. Briefly outlined, I will interpret his anthropology as one that understands human beings as story-telling beings who seek for an order of the world that provides them with stability and a distinct place in it. To be able to tell their own particular story, human beings fought for universal political and economic equality, which spilled over into aspirations of social equality, all of which constitute a movement towards universal ideals that, in turn, endangers the possibility of articulating a particular personal story of individual human beings because they have already come to understand themselves in purely secular, rational and universal terms, rather than in terms that address the totality of their existence (and emotional and spiritual needs). This is the tension of today, and the recognition of this is where we can go from toward a civil society.
    Why are human beings story-telling beings?  Because their self-understanding, their identity, their yearning for an authentic existence  is determined by the story they are able to tell of themselves. Forced to explain themselves everyone will be able to speak of his views supporting his decisions and actions, and find a larger justifying scheme for it. Whether this scheme is always coherent, or comprehensive, is another matter - but more important and for the most part, human beings perceive of their explanatory narratives as coherent and comprehensive. Of course, a narrative is not unalterable. It is rewritten many times in one's life, and not always are people fully aware of all implications of their narrative. Such is the case in "people who seem borne by an unknown force toward a goal of which they themselves are unaware."  Indeed, the personal narrative is principally couched in the origin of a person, as Tocqueville suggests: "Go back; look at the baby in his mother's arms; see how the outside world is first reflected in the still hazy mirror of his mind... only then will you understand the origin of his prejudices, habits and passions which are to dominate his life". In other words, look at the first perceptions of a child to understand her vocabulary of the order of the world, and the account of which I call a narrative.