The illusion of equality

The driving force here was the human desire for equality of conditions (equality, for Tocqueville, was not equivalent to democracy, but its guiding ‘principle’). Yet even as Tocqueville dissected this desire, the moralist in him questioned whether it could ever be satisfied. The more equal conditions become, he asserted, the more intolerable even tiny inequalities appear. It is a keen psychological insight,: ‘Hence there is no solution.’ Tocqueville saw  equality not as a real product of the age of revolutions ‘but rather as an imaginary quality, an illusion inherent in modernity’.

When inequality is the common law of a society,’ Tocqueville wrote, ‘the greatest inequalities do not call attention to themselves.’