by Daniel Troit

Created on: February 10, 2009

Alexis de Tocqueville was a member of the French aristocracy in the early 1800's. In his early twenties, he became interested in the phenomenon of Democracy and how it was emerging into his modern world. Curious about how such a profound transformation from aristocracy and class to popular sovereignty occurred, he and a friend procured a grant from the French government to study the prison system of the United States. Tocqueville admitted that the prison study was merely a pretext by which he could come to the United States and examine the materialization of Democracy on her shores. During his stay, Tocqueville traveled widely throughout the country, visiting places so far apart as New England and New Orleans. The result of his inquiry was his Democracy in America, considered by some to be as fundamental a work on American Democracy as those of Madison and Monroe.

In America, Tocqueville found a fondness for equality unlike anything he had encountered in France. Instead of the values of national identity or sanctioned hierarchy, he found that it was equality as a standard to itself that motivated Americans. When observing the privilege of another, he said, Americans rarely accepted the luxury as a side effect of superiority. Unlike the class system of Europe, America believed that all forms of prosperity were or ought to be within equal reach. Tocqueville once observed that it seemed Americans would rather be "equal in slavery than unequal in liberty".

Because of this preference for the egalitarian even over the libertarian, Tocqueville perceived a tension between equality and liberty that had thus far remained unaddressed. He noted that the population regarded even those privileges gained solely by the labor and industry of an individual with contempt and envy. After too much wealth or privilege was gained by a citizen, even by equally accessible means, the rest of society would demand the prosperity's equal redistribution. Though such a tendency ran contrary to the belief in liberty, he saw it everywhere in American culture. This led Tocqueville to conclude that equality and liberty may in fact pull a society in contrary directions.

Tocqueville proposed that the Individualism so fundamental to the American Democratic character was in fact the greatest contributor to the emergence of a central state authority. The American people subscribed to the notion that liberty was to be interpreted as a complete lack of encumbrance upon one's pursuit of happiness but

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