What would happen in a society that was increasingly liberal and individualistic, with a high degree of equality, but in which differences between people were noticeable? It would run the risk of having an even greater degree of enmity between people than a society with less equality. “When all conditions are unequal, there is no equality great enough to offend the eye,” Tocqueville wrote, “whereas the smallest dissimilarity appears shocking in the midst of general uniformity; the sight of it becomes more intolerable as uniformity is more complete.”13
