Modernity is the way of becoming more modern, and making things better than they were before. Modernity is essentially the breaking of traditions in one form or another. So, disruption of tradition is a huge, and to me the most important, facet of modernity. Durkheim and de Tocqueville, however, aren’t huge supporters of this type of revolution. While de Tocqueville was one of the first conservative intellectuals to influence the direction of sociology, he was very concerned about the detrimental effects that revolution and equality would have on those traditional relationships he valued. Alexis de Tocqueville came from an aristocratic background, so it is no surprise that he saw aristocracy, and subsequently inequality, as a structure
