Pierre Manent. An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)

Excerpt:

Is it possible to “end,” to “settle” the Revolution?  How can political institutions appropriate for the new society be constructed?  Tocqueville, like Constant and Guizot, had these questions thrust upon him.  However, they now presented themselves in an entirely different light.  The question of the representative regime, its foundations, organization, and functioning, lost its primordial importance.  For Constant and Guizot, the problem was representation: how to guarantee in the representative that ensemble of characteristics and opinions that make up society?  How to discover the “natural superiorities” concealed by society and have them participate in political power?  For Tocqueville, the problem becomes what is to be represented.  “Society,” this “social state” taken for granted for Constant and Guizot, given by history and at the same time conforming to nature, appeared to Tocqueville to be the result of a mysterious process, absolutely new and supremely important.  Equality, the characteristic of the new social state, is for him no longer simply a “hypothesis” used by the new regime to abolish all privilege of birth and grant equal rights to all.  It is an infinitely active principle, disrupting all aspects of social and political life, all aspects of human life.  The new equality is not a state, it is a process—“the growing equality of conditions”—whose outcome is very difficult to predict.

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