Even though it can be assumed that Tocqueville had heard of Hobbes and that he was also familiar with the main theses defended by the English philosopher, for example, through Arthur de Gobineau, it is not entirely clear whether he had read a work by Hobbes. In the first Démocratie, he explicitly mentions the homo puer robustus, which appears in Hobbes’ De Cive, but it seems more likely that Tocqueville knew this Hobbesian characterisation of man indirectly through Rousseau’s second Discours – he himself did not cite any source. In a letter to Sedgwick from 1856, however, he explicitly writes that, from the perspective of Europeans, the Americans represent “the puer robustus of Hobbes”.