Looking back on more than a century of expanding bureaucracies, waning civic virtue, and the increasing substitution of state-led planning for individual initiative, the work of Alexis de Tocqueville remains, unfortunately, prescient as ever. Fortunately for modern defenders of liberty, Ralph Raico left behind an unpublished manuscript on Tocqueville, posthumously made available by the Mises Institute. A renowned scholar of liberalism in its European roots, Raico’s treatment of Tocqueville is a masterclass in historical and political insight. It is also an excellent entry point for anyone interested in how Tocqueville diagnosed the subtle threats to liberty emerging from the very success of democratic institutions.
Raico, true to form, does not treat Tocqueville as an untouchable sage, but as a man shaped by his historical moment—an aristocrat who recognized the inevitability of democratic equality while fearing the moral and political consequences of its unchecked development. What Tocqueville observed in the United States during his 1831 tour, and later detailed in Democracy in America, was a system of voluntary association, civic engagement, and religious conviction that acted as a counterbalance to what he called “soft despotism”—a condition in which the people, while technically free, become so reliant on government to guide and administer their lives that liberty is quietly extinguished.
Raico zeroes in on this warning. Unlike the traditional tyrannies of kings or military juntas, Tocqueville’s “soft despotism” is more insidious. It does not come with chains and batons but with checklists, benefits, and technocrats. It is “absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild.” Over time, individuals surrender their independence not because they are coerced, but because they grow accustomed to relying on the state for everything from education to welfare to employment regulation. It is, as Raico emphasizes, the path not to freedom but to mediocrity and dependency.
Tocqueville’s hope, however, rested in what he found in America: a populace schooled in the habits of self-governance and guided by what he called “enlightened self-interest.” Americans, Tocqueville observed, understood that their personal well-being was tied to the general prosperity and legal order of the community. But even this wasn’t enough. Raico highlights Tocqueville’s more profound insight: that religion is necessary to sustain liberty, not because it enforces rules from on high, but because it fosters virtue, self-restraint, and a belief in rights that transcend human authority.
Here, Raico’s own classical liberalism shines. He underlines Tocqueville’s insistence that liberal societies cannot endure on self-interest alone. If our rights to life, liberty, and property do not come from God or some higher law, they are liable to be erased or redefined by the state. Tocqueville himself, though personally alienated from the Catholicism of his youth, argued that religious belief—particularly in the American context—provided the moral grounding that protected liberty from devolving into license or apathy. Importantly, he was no theocrat: he explicitly rejected the idea of state-enforced religion. What he proposed was subtler: that politicians and public figures ought to act as if they believed, not out of hypocrisy, but because faith served as a vital bulwark against democratic erosion.
Raico notes this with admiration and sees in it a valuable lesson for modern libertarians and classical liberals. One cannot preserve a free society merely through legal reforms or economic deregulation. One must cultivate citizens capable of living freely—and that means fostering a culture where the rights and responsibilities of liberty are internalized. In the absence of moral conviction, democratic man becomes easy prey for the technocrat, the bureaucrat, and the demagogue.
The essay also offers a powerful commentary on the paradoxes of democracy. Tocqueville understood that the democratic spirit, once unleashed, could not be put back in the bottle. Equality, he believed, was inevitable—”a Providential fact” moving inexorably forward. The challenge was not to resist it, but to shape it. As Raico makes clear, Tocqueville believed the key was to resist centralization: to disperse power through institutions like the township, the jury, and voluntary associations, which taught citizens to take ownership of their political and social lives. When citizens lose the habit of self-government, they invite the state to rule in their stead.
Raico’s Tocqueville is not a nostalgic romantic pining for lost aristocracies. He is a political realist who understands that greatness of soul and moral elevation are hard to cultivate in democratic societies obsessed with comfort, equality, and utility. The danger is not tyranny in the old sense—it is a flattening of the human spirit, a culture of triviality, and a citizenry unwilling to stand on its own.
Raico is particularly effective in placing Tocqueville within the broader context of 19th-century French liberalism. Like his mentor François Guizot, Tocqueville was both a historian and a statesman, seeking to understand how institutions evolve and how liberty can be preserved. Raico brings out this duality with elegance, showing how Tocqueville combined deep scholarship with political activism—both in the writing of Democracy in America and in his later career.
In all, this essay is a brilliant starting point for anyone interested in Tocqueville, liberalism, or the problems of democratic governance. In it, Raico reminds us that freedom is not self-sustaining. It requires institutions, habits, and above all, a moral order that affirms the dignity of the individual as something more than a cog in the state’s machinery.
In our current age—where identity politics, administrative overreach, and moral relativism threaten the foundations of civil society—Tocqueville’s warnings about “soft despotism” and the necessity of religion are not mere historical curiosities. They are calls to action. And thanks to Ralph Raico’s lucid, passionate, and erudite work, we are better equipped to heed them.
Image Credit: Portrait of Tocqueville, byThéodore Chassériau, via Wikimedia.
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