Many modern readers of Tocqueville have rightly stressed his concerns that democracy may bring tyranny of the majority, unduly centralized government, and excessive, leveling egalitarianism. Yet Tocqueville also saw in American democracy, in particular, dangers of racial hierarchies and industrial aristocracies protected by decentralization, and his analysis also can prompt more concern about gender equality in the United States than expressed. The challenges to American democracy in Tocqueville’s day and ours can be illuminated if we attend to his fears about forms of both equality and inequality in the United States.
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