ABSTRACT
Alexis de Tocqueville carries his analysis forward to the beginning of the "age of equality". He characterizes the impact of equalitarian ideas on the relations between masters and servants and analyzes the resulting crisis in human relations. From that crisis a new pattern of class relations emerges, replacing the earlier traditional one by an individualistic authority relationship. For the course of Western European industrialization we can posit a sequence leading first to a decline of the paternalistic and a rise of the impersonal element and subsequently a declining reliance on market forces and an increasing reliance on educational devices. When this view is taken, the eighteenth century appears as a major hiatus in Western European history. "Workingmen's combinations" are said to curtail the employer's as well as the worker's formal legal rights. The extension of various rights to the lower classes constitutes a development characteristic of each country.
