It's been over 60 years since I read Toqueville, so you'll need to depend on your own understanding of the text you included.
There are various study guides here -- https://www.sparknotes.com/search?q=tocqueville -- that include Toqueville's ideas and reactions to various aspects of life in the US during his time.
1. How are equality of social and economic conditions and economic opportunities connected in Tocqueville's text?
2. According to Tocqueville, why did an elite aristocracy never take root in the United States?
help would be highly appreciated as i do not understand Tocqueville's text:(
Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America
In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, a French lawyer, was commissioned by the French government to study American prisons. While in America, Tocqueville traveled to the Michigan frontier and as far south as New Orleans, but spent most of his time in New England. He became convinced that there was something exceptional about American society. Between 1835 and 1839, he published a two volume book, Democracy in America. The book is regarded as one of the great works of political thought because of its discussions of liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissez-faire economics. Tocqueville argued that these five attributes made America exceptional in the world. America’s social and economic equality enabled the United States to have a remarkable amount of political liberty.
Tocqueville believed the political liberty found on the American frontier helped keep people equal and led to individualism and free economic exchange, both of which benefited America because they were constrained by democratic institutions.
DEMOCRACY AND EQUALITY
Among the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people. I readily discovered the prodigious influence that this primary fact exercises on the whole course of society; it gives a peculiar direction to public opinion and a peculiar tenor to the laws; it imparts new maxims to the governing authorities and peculiar habits to the governed.
I soon perceived that the influence of this fact extends far beyond the political character and the laws of the country, and that it has no less effect on civil society than on the government; it creates opinions, gives birth to
new sentiments, founds novel customs, and modifies whatever it does not produce.
The emigrants who colonized the shores of America in the beginning of the seventeenth century somehow separated the democratic principle from all the principles that it had to contend with in the old communities of Europe, and transplanted it alone to the New World. It has there been able to spread in perfect freedom and peaceably. . . .
EQUALITY AND THE FRONTIER
Tocqueville believed social equality in the United States prevented the growth of an aristocracy and ensured popular democracy. In the excerpt below, he outlines how this equality combined with the open American frontier made the United States unique among nations and led to the development of capitalism.
The social condition of the Americans is eminently democratic; this was its character at the foundation of the Colonies, and is still more strongly marked at the present day. I have stated . . . that great equality existed among the emigrants who settled on the shores of New England. The germ of aristocracy was never planted in that part of the Union.
I do not mean that there is any deficiency of wealthy individuals in the United States; I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men, and where the profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property. But wealth circulates with inconceivable rapidity, and experience shows that it is rare to find two succeeding generations in the full enjoyment of it.
This picture . . . still gives a very imperfect idea of what is taking place in the new States of the West and South-west. At the end of the last century a few bold adventurers began to penetrate into the valleys of the Mississippi, and the mass of the population very soon began to move in that direction: communities unheard of till then were seen to emerge from the wilds. . . . and in the Western settlements we may behold democracy arrived at its utmost extreme. . . .
PUBLIC GOOD FROM INDIVIDUALISM
Individualism was a new concept in the 1800s and Tocqueville worried that it would cause people to pursue their self-interest at the expense of others. Tocqueville believed Americans had found ways to combine individual economic activity with democratic institutions so as to benefit rich and poor.
Individualism is a novel expression, to which a novel idea has given birth. Our fathers were only acquainted with egotism. Egotism is a passionate and exaggerated love of self. . . . Individualism is a mature and calm feelingwhich disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellow-creatures; and to draw apart with his family and his friends; so that, after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself. . . .
The great advantage of the Americans is that they have arrived at a state of democracy without having to endure a democratic revolution; and that they are born equal, instead of becoming so. . . . The Americans have combated by free institutions the tendency of equality to keep men asunder, and they have subdued it. . . .
In the United States the more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people; on the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: they listen to them, they speak to them every day. They know that the rich in democracies always stand in need of the poor. . . .
It would seem as if every imagination in the United States were upon the stretch to invent means of increasing the wealth and satisfying the wants of the public. The best-informed inhabitants of each district constantly use their information to discover new truths which may augment the general prosperity; and if they have made any such discoveries, they eagerly surrender them to the mass of the people.
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