This article is part of a larger work, American Political Cultures, to be published by Oxford University Press in 1993, © 1993.

1. Pierson, George Wilson, Tocqueville in America (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1959).Google Scholar Unfortunately, in writing about equality and democracy, Tocqueville often failed to heed his own advice. Pierson estimates that Tocquevilleused the term democratie in no less than “seven or eight different senses” (p. 459).

2. See, e.g., John C. Schaar, “Equality of Opportunity and Beyond,” in Equality, ed. Roland Pennock and John Chapman (New York: Atherton, 1967), p. 228; George C. Catlin, “Equality and What We Mean By It,” in Ibid., p. 99.

3. Stephen, James Fitzjames, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873)Google Scholar, quoted in Bedau, Hugo Adam, “Egalitarianismand theldea of Equality,” in Pennock, and Chapman, , Equality, p. 4.Google Scholar

4. The best analysis is Rae, Douglas, Equalities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

5. I take this distinction between equality as result and equality as process from Sowell, Thomas, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles (New York: Quill, 1987), chap. 6.Google Scholar The distinction between egalitarianism and competitive individualism is elaborated in Thompson, Michael, Ellis, Richard, and Wildavsky, Aaron, Cultural Theory (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990).Google Scholar

6. Sowell, , Conflict of Visions, p. 122.Google Scholar

7. This is the assumption made by Verba, Sidney and Orren, Gary R., for instance, who write that “the parties' differing views on equality are bounded by the American ideology of equal opportunity.... Americans have never striven to ensure that all people live alike. Rather, they have always followed the ideal of an equal start in the race so that those with greater ability and drive are allowed, and encouraged, to come out ahead” (Equality in America: The View from the Top [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985], pp. 124,71Google Scholar, emphasis added). But this formulation neglects the very different meanings given to the term “equal opportunity” in the equal results and equal process vision. In the equal process vision, the emphasis is on the opportunity to compete; in the equal results vision, the emphasis is on equalizing the resources with which to compete. Interpreted literally, equality of opportunity becomes not an invitation to excel in the race of life, but rather an insistence that at every step of the way advantages should be redistributed so as to ensure that every one has an equal chance. Interpreted in this way, equal opportunity becomes indistinguishable from equal results. Verba and Orren's own evidence suggests the strength of the results-oriented interpretation of equal opportunity among contemporary American elites, particularly feminist elites.

8. Turner, Frederick Jackson, The Frontier in American History (New York: Holt, 1962).Google ScholarPotter, David M., People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954).CrossRefGoogle ScholarHartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, 1955).Google ScholarBridges, Amy, A City in the Republic: Antebellum New York and the Origins of Machine Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).Google Scholar For recent work exploring the old question of American exceptionalism, see Shafer, Byron, ed., Is America Different?: A New Look at American Exceptionalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Ross, Dorothy, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Rose, Richard, “How Exceptional is the American Political Economy,” Political Science Quarterly 104 (1989): 91–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Also see Tyrell, Ian, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review 96 (1991), 1031–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the (to my mind) persuasive response by Michael McGerr, ‘The Price of the ‘New Transnational History,” Ibid., pp. 1056–67.

9. This thesis is argued in Wildavsky, Aaron, “Resolved, That Individualism and Egalitarianism be made Compatible in America: Political Cultural Roots of Exceptionalism” (Paper Prepared for a Conference on “American Exceptionalism” at Nuffield College, Oxford, England, 14–1604 1988)Google Scholar. This paper also appears in Wildavsky, Aaron, The Rise of Radical Egalitarianism (Washington, D.C.: American University Press, 1991).Google Scholar Also see Ellis, Richard and Wildavsky, Aaron, Dilemmas of Presidential Leadership: From Washington Through Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1989).Google Scholar

10. Ramsay, David, quoted in Wood, Gordon S., The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), p. 70; also see p. 425.Google Scholar

11. Wood, , Creation of American Republic, p. 70.Google Scholar

12. Ibid., p. 478.

13. Doerflinger, Thomas M., A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986).Google Scholar

14. Foner, Eric, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 194,129,133.Google Scholar

15. Ibid., pp. 196, 125. Wood, , Creation of American Republic, p. 402.Google Scholar

16. Foner, Paine and Revolutionary America, chap. 5; quotation p. 170.

17. Wood, , Creation of American Republic, p. 72.Google Scholar

18. In Part II of The Rights of Man, Foner points out, “Paine asserted for the first time that to do away with poverty in Europe, more was required than a simple transition to republican government. Paine outlined an economic program as close to a welfare state as could be imagined in the eighteenth century. The basis of taxation would be changed from poor rates and regressive levies on articles of consumption to direct, progressive taxes on property, especially land. From the proceeds, every poor family would receive a direct allocation of money to allow it to educate its children; a system of social security would enableall workers to retire at age sixty; … [and] public jobs and unemployment relief would be awarded to ‘the casual poor”’ (Paine and Revolutionary America, p. 218; also see Kates, Gary, “From Liberalism to Radicalism: Tom Paine's Rights of Man,” Journal of the History of Ideas 50 [1989]: 569–87).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. Paine, Thomas, “The Case of the Officers of Excise (1772),” in Thomas Paine Reader, ed. Foote, Michael and Kramnick, Isaac (Harmonds worth: Penguin, 1987), pp. 45,41.Google Scholar

20. Foner, , Paine and Revolutionary America, p. 95.Google Scholar Paine's egalitarianism is accented in Claeys, Gregory, Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Home, Thomas A., Property Rights and Poverty: Political Argument in Britain, 1605–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), pp. 203–209Google Scholar; Seaman, John, “Thomas Paine: Ransom, Civil Peace, and the Natural Right to Welfare,” Political Theory 16 (1988): 120–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Richard J. Ellis, “Radical Lockeanism in American Political Culture,” Western Political Quarterly (forthcoming).

21. Foner, , Paine and Revolutionary America, p. 181.Google Scholar

22. Ibid., esp. pp. 93–95.

23. The Rights of Man, quoted in “Editor's Introduction: The Life, Ideology and Legacy of Thomas Paine,” Thomas Paine Reader, pp. 24,26.

24. “Dissertation on First Principles of Government (1795),” Thomas Paine Reader, p. 462.

25. The prevalence of this view within the Jeffersonian party is documented in Mccoy, Drew R., The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).Google Scholar

26. Ellis and Wildavsky, Dilemmas of Presidential Leadership, chap. 6.

27. Remini, Robert V., Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, 1822–1832 (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), p. 298.Google Scholar

28. Hofstadter, Richard, The American Political Tradition (New York: Knopf, 1948).Google ScholarHammond, Bray, Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).Google Scholar Also see Diggins, John Patrick, The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 105–18.Google Scholar

29. Schlesinger, Arthur Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945).Google Scholar Also see Schlesinger, Arthur Jr., “The Ages of Jackson,” New York Review of Books, 7 12 1989.Google Scholar

30. Ashworth, John, ‘Agrarians’ and ‘Aristocrats’: Party Political Ideology in the United States, 1837–1846 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 24, 94,46,41.Google Scholar

31. Ibid., pp. 27,46,26.

32. Ibid., pp. 11,41.

33. Globe, Sep. 1840, quoted in Ashworth, , Agrarians and Aristocrats, p. 25.Google Scholar

34. Kohl, Lawrence Frederick, The Politics of Individualism: Parties and American Character in the Jacksonian Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 206.Google Scholar

35. Ashworth, , Agrarians and Aristocrats, pp. 29,40.Google Scholar

36. Kohl, , Politics of Individualism, p. 208Google Scholar, emphasis added.

37. Ashworth, , Agrarians and Aristocrats, p. 40.Google Scholar

38. "True Functions of Government,” in Social Theories of Jacksonian Democracy, ed. Blau, Joseph L. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1954), p. 77.Google Scholar

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40. Ibid., pp. 206, 208.

41. Farmer's Alliance, 28 February 1891, in The Populist Mind, ed. Pollack, Norman (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), pp. 18–19.Google Scholar A few years later, the newspaper reiterated that “a reigning plutocracy with the masses enslaved, is the natural development and end of individualism” (Pollack, Norman, The Populist Response to Industrial America [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962], p. 19).Google Scholar

42. Morgan, W. Scott, History of the Wheel and Alliance (1889)Google Scholar, in Pollack, , Populist Mind, pp. 247–48.Google Scholar Also see Pollack, Norman, The Just Polity: Populism, Law, and Human Welfare (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), pp. 89–91.Google Scholar

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46. Doster, quoted in Pollack, , Populist Mind, p. 12.Google ScholarMalecha, Gary Lee, “Understanding Agrarian Fundamentalism: A Cultural Interpretation of American Populism” (Paper prepared for delivery at the 1988 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington D.C., 1–4 09 1988), p. 37.Google Scholar

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52. Malecha, , “Understanding Agrarian Fundamentalism,” p. 42.Google Scholar

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57. Pollack, , The Just Polity, p. 181.Google Scholar Also see Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Knopf, 1955), p. 63.Google Scholar

58. Typical were William A. Peffer's complaint that “Money controls our legislation, it colors our judicial decisions, it manipulates parties, it controls policies” (The Farmer's Side, in Pollack, , Populist Mind, p. 86Google Scholar), and James B. Weaver's lament that “a bold and aggressive plutocracy has usurped the Government and is using it as a policeman to enforce its insolent degrees” (A Call to Action, in Pollack, , Populist Mind, p. 110Google Scholar).

59. William Peffer, quoted in Nugent, , Tolerant Populists, p. 98Google Scholar; and Pollack, , Populist Mind, p. 106.Google Scholar

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69. Ibid., p. 207.

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