De Tocqueville’s most acute insights on America were about its ‘democracy of manners’. The aristocratic Frenchman, whose travels coincided with Andrew Jackson’s presidency, did not fear a totalitarian future but a more insidious one that would emerge from the breast of our democratic temper. ‘The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal,’ de Tocqueville wrote, ‘but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness.’
