Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment (New Forum Books Book 65)

Because we experience equality as an ordinary reality, we perceive inequality as a profound injustice.

When we note the degree to which our society is not, and never has been, “all middle class,” we implicitly assume that it can and should be. That assumption reflects a historical experience more unusual than is sometimes understood.

The demand for equal pay for equal work assumes the dignity of salaried labor—an assumption foreign to aristocratic society.

When Tocqueville arrives in America, he suddenly beholds a society that is all third estate: a world without titles of nobility or primogeniture; a world where everyone, even the richest, works because the world of work is the locus of all of life’s interest;

Though Tocqueville himself is a steadfast political liberal who sits on the center left of France’s Chamber of Deputies during his years as representative from la Manche, he always feels “more at ease in dealing about some matter with aristocrats whose interest and opinions were entirely different from mine, than with the bourgeois whose ideas I sh

The Montaignean view that our common human condition matters more than artificial hierarchies of social status is the precursor of the democratic belief in the “equality of conditions,”

For as Aristotle pointed out long ago, it is our way of pursuing happiness that makes us who we are, both personally and politically: “it is through hunting for [happiness] in a different manner and by means of different things that individuals create ways of life and regimes that differ.”

“the inhabitant of the United States attaches himself to the goods of this world as if he was assured of not dying, and he throws himself into seizing those that pass within his reach with so much precipitation that one would say that at every instant he is afraid of ceasing to live before enjoying them.”

That anguish, however, may impel us to seek. Such seeking in anguish is the one rational response to a clear-eyed, undistracted assessment of our natural condition. If we engage in that search, we transform our restlessness from an irritable and directionless unease into a determined quest for an answer to the paradox of ourselves.