It is interesting that John Stuart Mill's turn away from narrow utilitarianism began with his reading of the Romantic poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge, who espoused in literature what Edmund Burke had espoused philosophically. They emphasized feeling and intuition rather than mere logic and rational categories of thought. It was this emphasis upon the emotional human experience that attracted the young Mill, who had been overly exposed to the scientific and coldly rationalistic doctrine of utilitarianism, an upbringing that had cut him off from much of what is genuinely human. But Mill had also read de Tocqueville, and just as the Romantic poets taught Mill that utilitarian psychology was lacking in human terms, de Tocqueville pointed out to him its sociological inadequacies.

What makes John Stuart Mill uniquely important in the development of liberal thought is his revision of the underlying assumptions of the classical doctrine. This de Tocqueville did not do; he was interested in critically analysing 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.