re: Can you guess who this quote is from...

quote:

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It's not deep because it's a lexical semantic failure. Democracy and socialism have much more in common than just the word equality or even the notion of equality. The quote first constructs a false premise only for the purpose of sounding clever later... and then fails to sound clever.

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It is not a lexical semantic failure on the part of the writer, Tocqueville, as the word socialism was understood at the time he wrote this. Tocqueville wrote this during the Revolutions of 1848, the ideas of the "French Socialists" of 1848 or Blanquists were the pre-cursors of Marxism. This group was violent and radical. French Republicans had made some alliance with the socialists against the monarchists and Tocqueville obviously saw the dangers of such an alliance and his quote should be taken in this context.