"Nothing seems at first sight less important than the outward form of human actions, yet there is nothing upon which men set more store: they grow used to everything except to living in a society which has not their own manners"
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Manners look like froth until you watch them decide who belongs. Tocqueville’s line is a scalpel aimed at a bourgeois delusion: that we’re guided by principles while being quietly ruled by surfaces. “Outward form” sounds trivial - posture, greetings, pacing, the little rituals that don’t change the facts of a situation. Yet Tocqueville insists those rituals are where power hides in plain sight, because they regulate recognition. Manners are the social interface; they tell you when to speak, how close to stand, what counts as respect. Break the code and you don’t just appear rude, you become illegible.
The subtext is sharper: tolerance has limits, and they’re often aesthetic. People can adjust to new laws, new technologies, even new hardships, he suggests, faster than they can adjust to being surrounded by a different style of being human. That’s why “men set more store” on manners: they’re a proxy for moral order. If your manners aren’t mine, your intentions become suspect, your competence questionable, your status contested.
Context matters. Tocqueville is watching modern democracy emerge, especially in America, where formal aristocratic hierarchies weaken but social sorting doesn’t vanish; it relocates. When birth matters less, behavior matters more. The paradox of egalitarian societies is that they preach equality while policing norms with extraordinary intensity. Manners become the soft infrastructure of conformity - and the quiet engine of exclusion.
The subtext is sharper: tolerance has limits, and they’re often aesthetic. People can adjust to new laws, new technologies, even new hardships, he suggests, faster than they can adjust to being surrounded by a different style of being human. That’s why “men set more store” on manners: they’re a proxy for moral order. If your manners aren’t mine, your intentions become suspect, your competence questionable, your status contested.
Context matters. Tocqueville is watching modern democracy emerge, especially in America, where formal aristocratic hierarchies weaken but social sorting doesn’t vanish; it relocates. When birth matters less, behavior matters more. The paradox of egalitarian societies is that they preach equality while policing norms with extraordinary intensity. Manners become the soft infrastructure of conformity - and the quiet engine of exclusion.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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