posed the question in probably the most profound analysis of American
democracy ever written. For Tocqueville, the United States was the most
advanced representative of a new species of society emerging from
centuries of development: "In running over the pages of [European]
history, we shall scarcely find a single great event of the last seven
hundred years that has not promoted equality of condition." So he wrote
in the introduction to the first volume of his Democracy in America.

Whither, then, are we tending? [he went on to ask] No one can say,
for terms of comparison already fail us. There is greater equality of
condition in Christian countries at the present day than there has
been at any previous time, in any part of the world, so that the
magnitude of what already has been done prevents us from foreseeing
what is yet to be accomplished.

In the United States he had looked upon the future, on

one country in the world where the great social revolution that I
am speaking of seems to have nearly reached its natural limits
. . . Men are there seen on a greater equality in point of fortune and
intellect, or, in other words, more equal in their strength, than
in any other country of the world, or in any age of which history has
preserved the remembrance. ²

The America that Tocqueville saw, however, was the America of
Andrew Jackson. It was an agrarian democracy, remarkably close to the
ideal often articulated by Jefferson.

Commerce, finance, and industry erupted into this agrarian society in a
gigantic explosion. By the time the century approached its last decade,
and another distinguished foreign observer looked upon the United
States, the America of Tocqueville had already passed away. In how many
senses of the word, James Bryce asked in 1899, does equality exist in the
United States?

Clearly not as regards material conditions. Sixty years ago there
were no great fortunes in America, few large fortunes, no poverty.
Now there is some poverty (though only in a few places can it be
called pauperism), many large fortunes, and a greater number of
gigantic fortunes than in any other country of the world.

He found also an intellectual elite, among whose members the "level of
exceptional attainment . . . rises faster than does the general level of
the multitude, so that in this regard also it appears that equality has
diminished and will diminish further."

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