HIS 108 Chapter Notes - Chapter 65: Alexis De Tocqueville, Egotism, Selfishness
27 Apr 2019
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Selfishness is a vice as old as the world, which does not belong to one form of society more than to another; individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens. Individualism is a mature and calm feelings, which disposes each member of the community at large to itself. Selfishness blights the germ of all virtue; individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of to spread in the same ratio as the equality of condition. As in aristocratic communities all the citizens occupy fixed positions, one above another, the him, and below himself another man whose cooperation he may claim. Among democratic nations new families are constantly springing up, others are constantly broken and the track of generations effaced. Aristocracy had made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king; democracy breaks that chain and severs every link of it.
