>
> 19th-century France vs. the 19th-century US? I have no idea. I was more
> thinking of the notion of the "pre-modern" as being this place in which
> everybody knew their place and classes moved smoothly together, which
> intuitively seems an odd notion for a post-Revolution Frenchman.
What you have here refers quite clearly to the first and second paragraph of your initial post. To that I indicated that Tocqueville's stance is probably tinged with a romantic notion of what pre-modern social relations were like. What I wrote, later, clearly referred to your comparison of 19th C France and 19th C US in terms of the difference between/uniqueness of individualism in the US vs France in your last paragraph - and I prefaced it as such.