rendered all the more acute by a heightened sense of envy, because the
‘equality that allows each citizen to entertain vast hopes...spurs them on’,
with the result that‘they struggle, they tire, they grow bitter’(DA, I.2.v).
At the same time, democratic societies, by making material achievement
open to all, engendered a‘passion for well-being’that could displace every
other pursuit (DA, II.1.v). With the bonds between people reduced to monet-
ary form, individuals were increasingly isolated from one another, leading to
an impoverishment of the social imagination and a pervasive social indiffer-
ence. In an aristocratic society, individuals identified with others in their
estate by the fact of similarity; and they were bound to particular people
above and beneath them by ties of obligation (Manent 1982, pp. 74–5). In
democracy, on the other hand, individuals merely shared an abstract sense of
commonality with the broader mass, to whom they owed little and from
whom they might expect even less. The desire to protect what one had, in a
society in which‘all the citizens are constantly on the move and in a perman-
ent state of transformation’(DA, II.3.xxi), could then fuel a fear of anarchy
and disorder, inducing a compulsive grasping for order and a growing intoler-
ance of difference.
The immediate result would be:
An innumerable multitude of men, alike and equal, constantly circling around in
pursuit of the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls. Each one
of them, withdrawn into himself, is almost unaware of the fate of the rest...they
are near enough but he does not notice them. He touches them but feels nothing.
(DA, II.4.vi)
But as the victims withdrew into‘a multitude of small private circles’, these
‘highly dangerous instincts’democracy unleashed posed even greater risks
(DA, II.3.xiii).^2
To begin, while a‘manly and legitimate passion for equality’elevates infer-
iors to the rank of superiors and so reconciles equality with liberty, there is also
a‘depraved taste for equality’, in which superiors are reduced to the level of
inferiors (DA, I.1.iii). This‘depraved taste for equality’did not merely debase
society; it also, and somewhat paradoxically, favoured a bargain in which
individuals were ready to accept a master so long as that master subjected
everyone equally.
In turn, that bargain was facilitated by an inherent trend to political and
administrative centralization. Myriad forces were at work (Elster 2009,
pp. 147–9).
(^2) Tocqueville’s French,‘instincts fort dangereux’, better conveys a sense of foreboding than the
English translation.
Tocqueville, Hancock, and the Sense of History