The French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville wrote
that men are born equal, but their destinies are shaped by the
inequality of conditions. De Tocqueville was the famous author of Democracy in America,
an epistle on the principles of civil government in a free society.
Born into the French aristocracy, de Tocqueville was obsessed about the
ideological notion of equality and what it could mean for Europe in an
age of revolutionary upheaval. The issues that dominated that bygone
epoch are still very much with us.