Tocqueville

"The government of democracy brings the nation of political rights to the level of the humblest citizens. He wrote," Just as the dissemination of wealth brings the notion of property within the reach of all the members of the community". | No visitor to the US left a more enduring record of his travels and observations than the French writer and political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, whose 'Democracy in America', first published in 1835, remains one of the most trenchant and insightful analyses of American social and political practices. | Nonetheless, Tocqueville was only one of the first of a long line of thinkers to worry whether such rough equality could survive in the face of a growing factory system that threatened to create divisions between industrial workers and a new business elite. | Tocqueville was far too shrewd an observer to be uncritical about the US, but his verdict was fundamentally positive.