RICHARD SENNETT
407
In both volumes, he attempts to expound these dangers of equality
without therefore concluding that equality itself is repreprehensible;
his concern is rather to discover how people who grow up in egalitar–
ian societies may avoid doing damage to themselves. Egalitarian
societies face unique dangers of self-debasement, that is, of impairment
of the quality of action and experience; these dangers, Tocqueville
believes, are counterbalanced by unique claims of legitimacy unavail–
able to the members of societies of privilege.
Putting the Tocquevillean view of the dangers of equality this
way jumps over the major problem and, indeed, the major weakness of
Tocqueville's thought: what is equality? Further, what is its relation to
"democracy," a word he uses sometimes as a synonym for equality,
sometimes as a consequence of it? Tocqueville is an inconstant and
loose writer; his intentions, however, are not inconsistent. One can
piece together a workable, logical definition of equality from Tocque–
ville's writing. That definition derives from the "discovery" about
equality that Tocqueville made.
Today we can think about equality in terms of two principles :
access
to resources or
distribution
of resources. In Western capitalist
societies, the principle of access is called equality of opportunity; in
socialist societies it is called "talent utilization potential." (This
barbarism comes from the Soviet planner Djumenton.) The principle
of equality of distribution is called in capitalist societies equality of
condition, in socialist societies constant-sum distribution. Before
Tocqueville, almost all discussions of equality focused on the question
of equality of access, and identified the resources to be opened up as
property or bureaucratic position. Tocqueville was the first to empha–
size the importance of constant-sum distribution-equality of
condition-in terms of a wider notion of social resources.
The result was a vision of society that today we would recognize
through the Marxian categories infrastructure and superstructure. It
would be absurd to make Tocqueville into a Marxian, but some of the
Marxian categories do help clarify Tocqueville's intent. The infrastruc–
ture Tocqueville has in mind is economic, and a political order is built
upon this base; democratic politics results from an equality of condi–
tions. What are the "conditions" Tocqueville has in mind? Here again
I find comparison to Marx useful, for Tocqueville means something by
this word akin to the meaning Marx gave to the term "production."
The equality of conditions Tocqueville envisions is an equal capacity
to realize one's desires in action: one can have the same goods as other
people, or the same kind of job, if one wants them; one's traffic with
