"Farewell to Bourgeois Kings," by tinkzorg
Posted by Badlands Journa... on Thursday, 26 August 2021Democracy, as bourgeousified in the post revolutionary era, would reveal itself to Tocqueville as likewise inadequately endowed with concern for the political but, unlike aristocracy, it threatened to become over-generneralized. Democratic equality is one way of promising commonality, but bourgeois individualism can undercut equality while bourgeois competitiveness destroys both equality and solidarity. The consequence is the perversion of generality and the prelude to democratic despotism. That dire condition is immanent in the democratic form of apartness, individualism, an over-particularization that withdraws from the public domain and thereby allows power to generalize itself, to extend its rules without encountering differences. Where traditional societies included distinctions of wealth, birth, and status within the political, democratic societies attempted a separation of the public and the private realms with social distinctions forbidden in the one and sanctioned in the other.--Sheldon Wolin, Tocqueville between two worlds (2003), p.160.