American Society's Equality Of Conditions By Alexis De Tocqueville

American society’s unique foundation in “equality of conditions” is seemingly looked to in great admiration by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America -- as he sees such a societal state as the inevitable outcome of a historical cause-and-effect chain in which “the noble has fallen on the social ladder, and the commoner has risen.” Despite such reverence however, Tocqueville also warns of several potential pitfalls arising from an equal state. In this paper, I will use Tocqueville's work to discuss one such perils of “equality of conditions”-- individualism -- and how it subsequently breeds an isolation among fellow countrymen that could very well lead to the demise of democracy, as Tocqueville himself puts it. I will do so through the

“Individualism is of democratic origin,” Tocqueville says, “and it threatens to develop as conditions become equal.” Tocqueville maintains a cerebral distinction between individualism and simple selfishness. Whereas selfishness is a “passionate and exaggerated love of self,” born from a “blind instinct,” individualism is a “reflective and peaceable sentiment” and is born of an “erroneous judgement.” While selfishness is a blatant vice, individualism is subtle and presents itself on the surface as a rational philosophy in an age of scientific reason that which Americans are keen to as Tocqueville noted early on. Individualism, if left alone, “first dries up only the source of public virtues; but in the long it attacks and destroys all the others and will finally be absorbed into selfishness.” __________________Isolation is what arises from individualism, which itself is inherently born from a state of

Tocqueville first makes note of how equal societies have a strong inclination to commerce and industry as opposed to simply agriculture. For a man who is too poor to “live in idleness,” yet too rich to feel the “the immediate fear of need,” such a path to a “hazardous, but lucrative position” appears as the sole means to satisfy his developed “taste for material enjoyments” -- as agriculture “suits only the rich who already have a great superfluity, or the poor who ask only to