In the introduction to Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville asserted that the history of the world, or at least of the West, exhibited a providential, inevitable movement towards equality. As the scholar Marvin Zetterbaum argued in his book Tocqueville and the Problem of Democracy, Tocqueville’s claim was partly rhetorical: by persuading democracy’s conservative opponents in France to accept its inevitability, he hoped to induce them to join in guiding it in a salutary direction, harmonious with human liberty and dignity. By contrast, in the last part of Volume Two of his book, Tocqueville expressed the fear that the principle of equality, if carried to an illiberal extreme, would culminate in a “tutelary” despotism, in which government, even if elective, would deprive individuals of the freedom to act, aiming to regulate all their actions for the sake of what it “knew” was their good.
