It is interesting that John Stuart Mill's turn away from narrow utilitarianism began with his reading of the Romantic poets, Wordworth and Coleridge, who espoused in literature what Edmund Burke had espoused philosophically. They emphasised feeling and intuition rather than mere logic and rational categories of thought. And it was this emphasis upon the emotional level human experience that attracted the young Mill who, as a young man, who overly exposed to the scientific and coldly rationalistic doctrine of utilitarianism, and whose upbringing in that doctrine had cut him off from much of what is genuinely human.

But Mill also had read de Tocqueville. And just as the Romantic poets taught Mill that utilitarian psychology was lacking terms, de Tocqueville pointed out to him its sociological inadequacies. Both demonstrated the need for a certain conservative perspective on humanity and society. Taken together, they emphasised along with Burke, emotional aspects of human behavior and the need for human beings to be integrated into some strictly rational-individualistic perspective of classical liberalism.

What makes John Stuart Mill uniquely important in the development of liberal thought in his revision of the underlining assumptions of the classical doctrine. This de Tocqueville did not do; he was interested in critically analyzing a concrete example of liberal democracy, not in debating the validity of the liberal ideology as such. Mill, on the other hand, was precisely interested in the philosophical validity of liberalism. To his mind, the kinds of concrete reforms that de Tocqueville advocates in 'Democracy in America' required a more fundamental reform of liberalism's basic philosophical assumptions.