Beschreibung:
<jats:p> Anyone who turns from the pages of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, written in the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, to American democracy as it exists today is confronted at once with a paradox. For in the first sentence of that work Tocqueville says that what struck him most forcefully about America was its "equality of conditions." Yet by many widely used measures of social and economic as opposed to political equality, the United States does not appear to have remained, if indeed it ever was, an especially egalitarian society. </jats:p>