Although we today characterize contemporary governments in the West as democratic, their institutions were designed to contain rather than promote democracy. Alexis de Tocqueville portrayed this paradox with the precision of a surgeon when he described America as a democratic society with an aristocratic (read, republican) politics. When Tocqueville arrived in the United States, about half a century after its founding, democracy's enduring and bad reputation was still intact among leaders and political thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. His short but memorable appearance in Athens had managed to attract more enemies and critics than friends. Athens may have been a democracy, but the best political theorists were not optimistic about it, which they dismissed as the rule of the poor. Twenty-five centuries would pass before John Dewey appeared as the first consistent theorist and philosopher of democracy