Those who went before are soon forgotten; of those who will come after no one has any idea: the interest of man is confiend to those in close propinquity to himself.

Those who went before are soon forgotten; of those who will come after no one has any idea: the interest of man is confiend to those in close propinquity to himself.

Aristocracy had made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the kind: democracy breaks that chain and severs every link of it.
They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing along, and they are apt to think their whole destiny is in their own hands.

Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants, and separates hhis contemporaries from him; it throws him back for ever upon himself along, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

It clearly contrasts modern universalism with traditional paticularism, and at the same time two opposite views of time. It evokes on the one hand a romanticism which still persists nowadays, even in sociological circles, and on the other, over and above Western aristocracy, it evolves the caste system and its hierarchized interdependence.