Democracy, for Tocqueville, was, as much as anything else, a condition of society in which men addressed each other as equals. It was only indirectly a matter of the franchise. As he observed in Democracy in America, “What is most important for democracy, is not that there are no great fortunes; it is that great fortunes do not rest in the same hands. In this way, there are the rich, but they do not form a class.”16
