Initiation.

Thanks to Chris and Brendan for the gentle nudges necessary to get me back to blogging.  The post below is courtesy of one of my favorite blogs, Mungowit’s End.  In the spirit of another favorite read, Marginal Revolution, this is the best paragraph that I’ve read today.  It comes from a book review by Thomas Pavel of Hugh Brogan’s new biography, "Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life".  Look for it on page D9 of today’s Wall Street Journal.

"Tocqueville’s admiration for America was nevertheless qualified by his suspicion of equality.  For Tocqueville, human diversity is always present and always desireable, but it is also vulnerable, especially in democratic societies, to a withering quest for uniformity.  The future belonged to democracy, he concluded, but it was unclear whether it would evolve toward liberty or a new kind of despotism."