ABSTRACT
The real key to the great difference between Democracy in America and Habits of the Heart is that Alexis de Tocqueville was a humanist amateur, while the authors suffer from what Robert K. Merton has called the “trained incapacity” of their profession. The chapter shows that the individualism may have grown cancerous — that it may be destroying those social integuments that Tocqueville saw as moderating its more destructive potentialities, that it may be threatening the survival of freedom itself”. It seems to that it is individualism, and not equality; as Tocqueville thought, that has marched inexorably through our history. This shows a total misunderstanding of Tocqueville, whose brilliant contributions to our understanding of the totalitarian tendencies of our age depend on equality and individualism being, as it were, two sides of the same coin. Even Tocqueville would hardly have predicted the feminization of poverty, or the academic family with one partner in Buffalo and another in Milwaukee.
