How Democracy Breeds

In a chapter of Democracy in America entitled 'Why the Americans are often so restless in the midst of their prosperity, de Tocqueville sketched an enduring analysis of the relationship between high expectations and dissatisfaction, between political equality and envy. He wrote, 'When all the prerogatives of birth and fortune have been abolished, when every profession is open to everyone, an ambitious man may think it is easy to launch himself on a great career and feel that he has been called to no common destiny. But this is a delusion which experience quickly corrects. When inequality is the general rule in society, the greatest inequalities attract no attention, but when everything is more or less level, the slightest variation is noticed. That is the reason for the strange melancholy, often haunting inhabitants of democracies in the midst of abundance, and of that disgust with life sometimes gripping them even in calm and easy circumstances.