Rather, from the outset Piketty adopts (without any explicit justification) the premise that economic and political equality is an unmitigated good, to be advanced to the greatest degree possible. Nor does he exhibit any of Tocqueville’s reservations about the dangers of carrying the egalitarian principle to an extreme. Unlike Tocqueville’s claim in this regard, Piketty’s assertion of that movement in A Brief History of Equality is based on evidence from various portions of the world, although he is chiefly focused on Europe (especially France) and America.Ĭontrary to its title, Piketty’s book is not chiefly historical. Thomas Piketty, a French economist who achieved international celebrity with his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, begins his sequel to that work by observing a worldwide trend over the past two centuries in the direction of equality. Finally, in Tocqueville’s account, Americans took a direct, active role in their governance, with most domestic affairs being decided at the local level. Nor could anyone, regardless of his wealth, position, or achievements, afford to look down on his fellows: if anything, those with aristocratic pretensions needed to conceal them from the public.

Moreover, since all officeholders derived their positions, directly or indirectly, from popular election, Americans were politically equal. But the economic inequalities America exhibited were fluctuating rather than fixed, as people took advantage of the opportunity to rise through their own efforts. By this he didn’t mean that nobody was richer, more politically influential, or more socially renowned than anyone else. Tocqueville found the most distinctive characteristic of American democracy to be the equality of conditions that all citizens enjoyed. By contrast, in the last part of Volume Two of his book, Tocqueville expressed the fear that the principle of equality, if carried to an illiberal extreme, would culminate in a “tutelary” despotism, in which government, even if elective, would deprive individuals of the freedom to act, aiming to regulate all their actions for the sake of what it “knew” was their good. As the scholar Marvin Zetterbaum argued in his book Tocqueville and the Problem of Democracy, Tocqueville’s claim was partly rhetorical: by persuading democracy’s conservative opponents in France to accept its inevitability, he hoped to induce them to join in guiding it in a salutary direction, harmonious with human liberty and dignity.

In the introduction to Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville asserted that the history of the world, or at least of the West, exhibited a providential, inevitable movement towards equality.

Tocqueville's