Political Equality, Then and Now

Abstract

For this audience l hardly need to quote Tocqueville often-cited opening remarks in the first volume of his Democracy in America on “the general equality of conditions” that, he believed, prevailed among Americans in 1830. You are all familiar, too, with his observation that equality of condition had gradually spread in France since the eleventh century, and his conclusion that the gradual development of the equality of conditios is... a providential fact, and it possesses all the characteristics of a Divine decree: it is universal, it is durable, it constantly eludes all human interference, and all events ass well as all men contribute to its progress.