[nicollo]

That's my feeling -- he wanted Americans of all periods to acknowledge 1990's "enlightenment." (Note the jabs at Justice Thomas).

It seems back-ass to me that he rejects the "liberal persuasion" that led to his desired enlightenment while rejecting contemporaneous objections to it. Really, this sh*t gets published, and by the U. VA on it's De Tocqueville website? I'm beyond cursing. I'm depressed.

Thanks for your thoughts. Your...

His point is that the founding wasn't egalitarian enough...we didn't slaughter and sink barge loads of live people like a real egalitarian liberal revolution....the French version.

...makes this exercise worthwhile!

[KC Burke]

Basically, upon re-reading by a general joe like me, I see him as attributing a bunch of false Rouseauian concepts to the Tocquevillian readings of history and then knocking down that straw-man by saying that we weren't an egalitarian nation. The response is best made that Tocqueville never said we were. We were cognizant of our Prescriptive Rights as Englishmen and translated that into a nation animated by those freedoms.

Looking at our history based on what inequality there was is like measuring the depth of the rivers at the time--interesting, but of little use.

Such doesn't make the real deep comparative issues like why the founder's generation thought so little of slavery as a injustice: American Slaves of the 1700s had better working conditions, hours and lives than the feudal serfs of Europe. (I hasten to add that conditions were much worse in the 1800s, but the point made bu Forrest McDonald illustrates how little inequality really effects us.)