Alexis de Tocqueville was a French sociologist and political theorist who traveled to the United States in 1831. He returned with a wealth of broader observations that he organized in “Democracy in America”, observations on equality and individualism. He came to America to imagine a future democratic society.
His first observation was that innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Tocqueville brings up points of how all men leading different lives, talking how we all are strangers to the fate of others. How our lives only revolve around our close family rather than both close family and “the whole of mankind”. He then brings up points of how the supposed friends, we know they are there but never acknowledge it, “he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches …show more content…
He says that gives a person powers that are absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. Tocqueville gives an example by saying the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood, but to seek the contrary, and to keep them in perpetual childhood. He says people are often content with the fact of rejoicing, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing in that of their willingly labors. That their labors choose to be the sole agent of that happiness, they provide their security, fore-see and supply their necessities, facilitate their pleasures, manage their principal concerns, and direct their industry. What they don’t see are the remains says Tocqueville, how they spare them the care of thinking and all the trouble of living. “The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits” says