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PARTISAN REVIEW
Tocqueville's writing is in this sense an ideology of equality. One
of the distinctive marks of advanced industrial society is that such an
ideology will be pervasive, even as real material conditions are vastly
unequal and inequitable. There is in fact a positive correlation
between the belief in equality of condition and the existence of unequal
conditions. Challenges to the structures of inequality are deflected in a
gross way by the illusion that "fundamentally" everyone is the same.
They are deflected in a more subtle way by the creation of individualist
mentality in the members of the society, so that they conceive of the
responsibility for gratification and personal development as an indi–
vidual matter.
The equation of private anxiety and public apathy can be recog–
nized in the two great industrial nations of the modern world, the
Soviet Union and the United States.
In
the Soviet Union, the idea that
the essential tasks of redistribution are largely accomplished is en–
shrined in law, generally accepted in popular mythology if opinion
studies are to be believed, and completely contravened by the facts of
bureaucratic hierarchy and dail y behavior.
In
the United States, it is the
ideology of equal opportunity that is enshrined in official policy and
disbelieved by a majority of the populace as an abstract proposition.
But again, if opinion studies are accurate, in ordinary life people act as
if the responsibility for their satisfaction in life is an entirely individual
and private affair-exactly the consequence of what Tocqueville saw as
a belief in an equality of condition. What, then, are we to make of the
dangers of equality, or of an ideology of equality, that Tocqueville
perceived?
In
the last twenty years, many radical writers in North
America and Western Europe have turned away from the classical
problem in political economy, that of domination, to attacks on
inequality alone. All too often it is assumed that if social conditions
can be equalized, then the problems of unjust domination will neces–
sarily be solved. The import of Tocqueville's writing is to challenge
this assumption.
