SOURCE: "Political Equality and Economic Inequality," in Commager on Tocqueville, University of Missouri Press, 1993, pp. 93-110.

In this excerpt, Commager considers the paradox of equality and individualism—a paradox that preoccupied Tocqueville—and suggests that it poses even greater problems in the 1990s.

The grand theme of Democracy in America is the reconciliation of equality or democracy—for he used the words interchangeably—with liberty. Democracy, he was confident, was the wave of the future (he was not really all that confident, but he insisted in the book that he was). Democracy had triumphed in America; its triumph in the Old World was well nigh inevitable. The prospect of that triumph was both exhilarating and sobering: exhilarating because democracy made for justice, sobering because it threatened liberty, which was, after all, the greatest and the ultimate end of government.

I have already examined some of the threats that...