RICHARD SENNETT
him, fills him with fear and regret, and maintains his spirit in a state
of incessant trepidation; at every moment he feels he is on the verge
of changing his designs and his place in life.
415
The images of anxiety in this second volume arise precisely out of
the idea of an equalized plane of experience on which people's lives are
not, however, identical reproductions of each other. Whatever is
available must be exhaustively experienced; one has the illusion that
only
after
this exhaustive consumption can one decide what one wants.
The desire for what one hasn't is further genuine horizontal mobility;
one doesn't want more in order to be
better
than other people.
Tocqueville's thought on equality and mobility is therefore contrary to
that of Ortega, who saw citizens of a mass society continuall y and
fruitlessly attempting by their goods to declare the individual superior–
ity of their persons. In times of either abundance or scarcity, for
Tocqueville the operating principle of an equalized condition is that
fixed possession is meaningless in terms of gratification; indeed,
stability seems a premature death. The result is a society of anxiety,
with constant declarations of what's wrong, and no clear sense of what
is finally desirable.
Two political consequences follow from this restricted restless–
ness. Resistance to the state, the will to fight for liberty, diminishes.
The ambition for liberty is too demanding to be easily meshed with the
more fundamental kinds of ambitions an equal society of individuals
harbors; moreover, it appears to be a betrayal to the others, who are
simply trying to "find themselves," "make a life for themselves,"
engage in "self-discovery" through increasingly trivial forms of experi–
ence. The demand for liberty, like any other sphere, so threatens those
absorbed in the "anxious, narrow tasks of individualism" that they
interpret it as a form of personal insult. This is why, Tocqueville
argues, if a man in an egalitarian state calls his comrades to arms in the
name of liberty, their first impulse will be to kill him.
The second political consequence returns to the issue that both–
ered Tocqueville in his first volume: Why do egalitarian societies aim
at more than the brute domination of dissidents, idealists, or critics,
and instead try to reform the impulses of these chalI engers so that they
too feel what the majority feels? Now TocquevilIe can answer that
psychological problem in social psychological terms. The idea that
private anxiety is meaningless is intolerable in an egalitarian society.
By a perverse and tautological chain, private existence, no matter what
its present pain, must be meaningful in order for the individual to
detach himself from the mass; he does so in the illusion thal he can
find, someday, a gratifying life in the personal sphere. A dissenter is
