Tocqueville predicted specialized factory labor would reintroduce permanent class inequality.

Evidence

When a work man is unceasingly and exclusively engaged in the fabrication of one thing, he ultimately does his work with singular dexterity; but at the same time he loses the general faculty of applying his mind to the direction of the work… . [While] the science of manufacture lowers the class of workmen, it raises the class of masters… . [If] ever a permanent inequality of condi­ tions … again penetrates into the world, it may be predicted that this is the gate by which they will enter. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 365

Categorization

• SHARE: Send to anyone in labor sociology or the division-of-labor literature — Tocqueville’s strikingly early articulation of deskilling as a class-divider.