Editing Alexis de Tocqueville (section)

=== On the American social contract ===
Tocqueville's penetrating analysis sought to understand the peculiar nature of American political life. In describing the American, he agreed with thinkers such as [[Aristotle]] and [[Montesquieu]] that the balance of property determined the balance of political power; however, his conclusions differed radically from those of his predecessors. Tocqueville tried to understand why the United States was so different from Europe in the last throes of [[aristocracy]]. In contrast to the aristocratic ethic, the United States was a society where hard work and money-making was the dominant ethic, where the common man enjoyed a level of dignity which was unprecedented, where commoners never deferred to elites and where what he described as crass individualism and market capitalism had taken root to an extraordinary degree.{{citation needed|date=July 2020}}

Tocqueville writes: "Among a democratic people, where there is no hereditary wealth, every man works to earn a living. ... Labor is held in honor; the prejudice is not against but in its favor."<ref>{{cite web|url=http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/DETOC/ch2_18.htm|title=Tocqueville: Book II Chapter 18|publisher=Xroads.virginia.edu|access-date=23 June 2012|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120607070314/http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/ch2_18.htm|archive-date=7 June 2012|url-status=dead}}</ref> Tocqueville asserted that the values that had triumphed in the North and were present in the South had begun to suffocate old-world ethics and social arrangements. Legislatures abolished [[primogeniture]] and [[Fee tail|entails]], resulting in more widely distributed land holdings. This was a contrast to the general aristocratic pattern in which only the eldest child, usually a man, inherited the estate, which had the effect of keeping large estates intact from generation to generation.<ref name=twsC11r44/>

In contrast, landed elites in the United States were less likely to pass on fortunes to a single child by the action of [[primogeniture]], which meant that as time went by large estates became broken up within a few generations which in turn made the children more equal overall.<ref name=twsC11r44/> According to Joshua Kaplan's Tocqueville, it was not always a negative development since bonds of affection and shared experience between children often replaced the more formal relation between the eldest child and the siblings, characteristic of the previous aristocratic pattern.<ref name=twsC11r44/> Overall, hereditary fortunes in the new democracies became exceedingly difficult to secure and more people were forced to struggle for their own living.{{citation needed|date=July 2020}}

[[File:Alexis de Tocqueville.jpg|thumb|250px|A sketch of Tocqueville]]
As Tocqueville understood it, this rapidly democratizing society had a population devoted to "middling" values which wanted to amass through hard work vast fortunes. In Tocqueville's mind, this explained why the United States was so different from Europe. In Europe, he claimed, nobody cared about making money. The lower classes had no hope of gaining more than minimal wealth while the upper classes found it crass, vulgar and unbecoming of their sort to care about something as unseemly as money and many were virtually guaranteed wealth and took it for granted. At the same time in the United States, workers would see people fashioned in exquisite attire and merely proclaim that through hard work they too would soon possess the fortune necessary to enjoy such luxuries.{{citation needed|date=July 2020}}