In Democracy in America, published in two parts in 1835 and 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: “I accost an American sailor, and inquire why the ships of his country are built so as to last but for a short time; he answers without hesitation, that the art of navigation is every day making such rapid progress, that the finest vessel would become almost useless if it lasted beyond a few years.”
From such answers, Tocqueville wrote, the American “infers that man is endowed with an indefinite faculty of improvement.” The chapter is titled “How Equality Suggests to the Americans the Idea of the Indefinite Perfectibility of Man.”