3. Discuss why Tocqueville esteems "the equality of conditions" in American society. How does Tocqueville's understanding of race differ from Beaumont's?
He could see there the full extent of the democratic phenomenon, and discerned its "generative fact": the equality of conditions.
The equality of conditions defines a social state where the influence of one man over another-central to the aristocratic regime-has been replaced with the egalitarian idea of individual consent. As Manent tersely puts it, "In such a society, the acts of each have only two legitimate sources: personal will or the general will.
- reason that democracy works in the U.S.
o #3 is that there is not aristocracy, and therefore there is a great sense of equality
o manifests in equality of intelligence (little dispersion, small gradient)
- township is the locust of freedom and equality
- Amongst the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions. I readily discovered the prodigious influence which this primary fact exercises on the whole course of society, by giving a certain direction to public opinion, and a certain tenor to the laws; by imparting new maxims to the governing powers, and peculiar habits to the governed. I speedily perceived that the influence of this fact extends far beyond the political character and the laws of the country, and that it has no less empire over civil society than over the Government; it creates opinions, engenders sentiments, suggests the ordinary practices of life, and modifies whatever it does not produce. The more I advanced in the study of American society, the more I perceived that the equality of conditions is the fundamental fact from which all others seem to be derived, and the central point at which all my observations constantly terminated. (INTRO)
- I then turned my thoughts to our own hemisphere, wh...