"The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age"
About this Quote
Auden slips a blade under democracy's self-congratulation. If a society claims it has ditched rank and money, it doesn’t float into egalitarian bliss; it just finds a new way to sort people. The line’s pivot - "still less" - is the acid: he treats racial hierarchy not as an aberration outside democracy but as a familiar replacement people reach for when old aristocratic markers lose legitimacy. That parenthetical sting ("as is apt to happen") reads like a weary footnote from someone who’s watched supposedly modern nations reinvent ancient prejudices with better PR.
His real provocation, though, is the last word: "age". It lands with the force of an uncomfortable diagnosis. Age is a distinction that can masquerade as natural rather than political. You can discriminate while claiming you’re merely being "realistic" about experience, energy, maturity, or "the future". In a democracy, where inherited titles are embarrassing and overt plutocracy is at least rhetorically taboo, age becomes a cleaner proxy for authority and exclusion: who gets listened to, who gets hired, who is seen as expendable, who is trusted with power.
Context matters: Auden writes as a 20th-century witness to mass politics, propaganda, and the bureaucratic state - a world where citizenship is equal on paper and stratified in practice. The sentence is shaped like a syllogism, but it behaves like satire: democracy doesn’t abolish hierarchy; it updates it. Age is the hierarchy that can be defended as common sense, right up until it hardens into a caste system with birthday-based borders.
His real provocation, though, is the last word: "age". It lands with the force of an uncomfortable diagnosis. Age is a distinction that can masquerade as natural rather than political. You can discriminate while claiming you’re merely being "realistic" about experience, energy, maturity, or "the future". In a democracy, where inherited titles are embarrassing and overt plutocracy is at least rhetorically taboo, age becomes a cleaner proxy for authority and exclusion: who gets listened to, who gets hired, who is seen as expendable, who is trusted with power.
Context matters: Auden writes as a 20th-century witness to mass politics, propaganda, and the bureaucratic state - a world where citizenship is equal on paper and stratified in practice. The sentence is shaped like a syllogism, but it behaves like satire: democracy doesn’t abolish hierarchy; it updates it. Age is the hierarchy that can be defended as common sense, right up until it hardens into a caste system with birthday-based borders.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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