This paper was presented at Telos in Europe: The L’Aquila Conference, held on September 7-9, 2012, in L’Aquila, Italy.
It is with Tocqueville that the term democracy acquires a positive connotation. When the first part of Democracy in America appeared in 1835, the very title came as a surprise. It was radically new, and it struck people like a bolt from the blue. Tocqueville took another unprecedented step when he associated democracy and equality. According to Aristotle, equality is an aspect of justice, not democracy. The equality that Tocqueville had in mind was not political or economic, but social; it referred to a social condition arising from equality of condition and from a pervasive egalitarian ethos. The latter reflected, in turn, the absence of a feudal past in the New World. Back in Europe and France, Tocqueville lived through the events of 1848, when the notion of “revolution” gained a socialist character. It is at such point that Tocqueville perceives a conflict between socialism and liberty: socialism means equality without liberty, while democracy stands for equality and freedom. He thus starts a new debate, that of the problematic relationship between equality and liberty, which draws on his dual political experiences in Europe and America. He discovers that it is through their synthesis that a political system capable of combining the best aspects of liberty and equality might emerge. Liberal democracy could therefore be born of the encounter between Europe and America, that is to say, the two main parts of the Western World.
This article examines the policy discussion surrounding the concept of “the European city.” This innocuous phrase has become a source of considerable concern among urban planners, architects, and sociologists because “the European city” is consistently described as under siege by the economics of globalization and new media technology. At stake is an idealized experience of urbanity that is closely associated with the history of European civilization, the emergence of liberal democracy, personal freedoms, and the market economy as a localized exchange that could be regulated by the state. Despite these modern connotations, the ideal type of this European city is medieval, wherein well-preserved historic buildings are aligned along irregular streets open only to pedestrians. The type of building that today is considered typical of the European city predates the Enlightenment and most certainly has little in common with industrialization. 
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, a widespread rethinking of political history and social theory commenced. Questions long frozen in the glacial stand-off between East and West began to thaw out, and the ideological mythologies of the twentieth century were subjected to new scrutiny. Why had the century of modernity been so centrally catastrophic? What was the nature of the worst offenders, the totalitarian regimes—especially in Germany, Italy, and Russia—that had generated so much violence? How could intellectuals and public opinion alike have facilely regarded Nazi Germany and fascist Italy as nearly identical formations (when they displayed so many differences)? And how could Stalinist Russia have been hailed as a positive alternative to Nazi Germany (when they displayed so many similarities)? With the disappearance of the Soviet Union, these interrogations could be pursued without the agenda, baggage, and defensiveness of the previous historical era. The question of the totalitarian state could finally be posed with the advantage of historical distance..
