Alexis de Tocqueville

In Part I of Democracy in America, Tocqueville had glimpsed the poten­tial for modern tyranny in several different directions. If despotism came, it might be in the form of an all-powerful legislature, or control of an omni­present majority, or even a military dictator, He had also mentioned the pos­sibility of centralization of power in the state-apparatus itself, the bureau­cracy. In Part II, this becomes his overriding fear.

     Tocqueville was well aware that government activity was expanding everywhere in Europe, but the situation in his own country preoccupied him:

I assert that there is no country in Europe where the public administration has become not only more centralized, but more inquisitive and more minute [than in France]; everywhere it interferes in private concerns more than it did; it regu­lates more undertakings, and undertakings of a lesser kind; and it gains a firmer footing ever day, about, above, and around all private persons, to assist, to advise, and to coerce them.

Everywhere the central government seemed to be absorbing the life of society — in education, in charitable endeavors, even in religious affairs. And, in recent years, another whole field had been opened up to government encroachment — the new world of industry.

     Although Tocqueville had no great interest in economics, beginning in the late 1830s, industrial developments came to the fore in French politics, and, as a deputy, Tocqueville was made aware of the vast potential for abuse in this field. He wrote to Royer-Collard:

In the present century, to deliver over to the government the direction of industry is to surrender to it the very heart of the next generation. It is one more great link added to the long chain that already envelops and presses the individual on all sides.

Tocqueville saw that industry would count for more and more as time went on, and the specter of economic control being added to political domination almost filled him with despair. As he expresses it in Part II:

Governments appropriate to themselves and put to their own use the greater part of the new force which industry has created in the world of our time. Industry leads us along, and they lead industry.

The beneficiaries of government aggrandizement of all areas of life was the carried on the government’s business — that incarnated the state more than any nominal ruler: the bureaucracy.

In proportion as the functions of the central power are augmented, the number of public offices representing that power must also increase. They form a nation within each nation; and as they share the stability of the government, they more and more fill up the place of an aristocracy.

Tocqueville was well aware of the connections between growing centralization and the bureaucratic class.

     Centralized government had been refined and consummated by Napoleon, but his way had been paved by the Revolution. Under the Old Regime, the king used to send out officials — called intendants — who were in charge of the various provinces. But these intendants had to confront the different privileged groups and assem­blies of the complex system that had been built up through the centuries — groups like the provincial estates, judges who owned their offices because they had bought or inherited them, towns with special chartered rights, and so on. All these the Revolution swept away. Now, under the Napoleonic regime, when an official (now called a prefect) was put in charge of one of the departments which the territory of France had been divided into, he encountered no resistance or rivalry. One of Napoleon’s followers exultantly described the system:

The prefect, essentially charged with the execution of orders from Paris, transmits these orders to the sub-prefect; from him they are passed on to the mayors of the cities, towns, and villages. In this manner, the chain of execution descends uninterruptedly from the minister to the administered and transmits the law and the orders of the government to the last branchings of the social order with the rapidity of an electric flow.

     After his trip to America, when he was wrest­ling with his great themes, he wrote to his father, asking for his opinion on the prospects for decentralization in France. After all, its advantages for America — in the vitality of the nation and the citizen’s education for public affairs — were indisputable. As a prefect under the Restoration, Hervé de Tocqueville was well acquainted with administration in France. He replied that the kind of federation possessed by the Americans was unsuitable for France, surrounded by powerful neighbors. Still, it was hardly necessary to shunt every local affair, down to the smallest, to a ministry in Paris. Would there ever be a revival of local liberties? Tocqueville’s father doubted it, and his rea­son is interesting:

There exist too many persons for whom centralization is profitable, or who hold a position in the central bureau­cracy that they would seek in vain elsewhere, for these abuses to be uprooted for a long time. These people have established it as an article of faith that nothing is done well except by the government itself, and they will defend this dogma with obstinacy.

Tocqueville gathered the same view from other sources as well. In England, he spoke with the liberal reformer John Bowring, who was proud of the decentralized systern England enjoyed at that time. Of France, however, Bowring said:

You will never be able to decentralize. Centralization is too good a bait for the greed of the rulers. Even those who once preached decentralization always abandon their doctrines on coming to power. You can be sure of that.

Tocqueville’s experiences while serving in the Chamber confirmed this view. And he was able to identify the social base of this bureaucratic Leviathan: it derives from the middle class. In his Recollections, written when his politi­cal career was over, he indicts this middle-class, or bourgeoisie, that had come to power under the monarchy of Louis Philippe:

It entrenched itself in every vacant government position, prodigiously augmented the number of such positions, and accustomed itself to living almost as much upon the public treasury as upon its own efforts.

     What occurs in the course of the development of the modern State is a cancerous growth of government functionaries, largely drawn from the educated middle-class. Rather than finding productive occupations in the voluntary, market-sector of society, more and more members of this class prefer to snare a niche for themselves in the bureaucracy. In his later years, Tocqueville continued his study of this social pathology, adding a wider historical perspective. The growth of the state-apparatus, he found, had been proceeding for centuries.

     Now, given this relentlessly spreading central government absorbing more and more of the life of society, given the obsession with material pleasures and self-advancement that foster individualism and turn people away from the affairs of their society, Tocqueville is ready to depict the great danger he sees in the future. It is something new in the world, and, since he cannot give it a name, he will describe it:

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observer is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike. ... Each exists only in himself and for himself alone;  and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon it upon itself to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, it prepared men for manhood. But it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood. It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry. ... What remains but to spare them all the care of thinking and all trouble of living?

It is not too difficult to see why Tocqueville has been referred to as “a prophet,” the “prophet of mass society.” To some commentators, he was able to foresee, in the midst of the age of liberalism, the rise of totalitarian government. To others, what Tocqueville seems to be tracing is the modern Welfare State, which offers the people cradle-to-grave security and, Tocqueville would say, asks for nothing in return but their freedom.

     Some will be astonished by what appears to be Tocqueville’s intuition in foreseeing the rise of an all-powerful government. After all, wasn’t his own time, the mid-nineteenth century, the age of next to no government, of the triumph of the laissez-faire philosophy restricting the state behind the most severe barriers possible? But the fact is that the steady growth of the govern­ment — of the social functions it claimed competence over and especially of its bureaucracy — was almost a cliche of political thought of the time. From classical liberals like Thomas Macaulay and Frédéric Bastiat to anarchists like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Michael Bakunin, the warning was sounded of the rise of the kind of state that would monopolize all of the activities of society. Such a warning was also issued by a man many would hardly expect it from — Karl Marx. In 1852, he described the French government as he saw it:

This executive power, with its enormous bureaucracy and military organization, with its ingenious state machinery, with a host of officials numbering half a million, besides an army of another half million, this appalling parasitic body, which enmeshes French society like a net and chokes all its pores, sprang up in the days of the absolute monarchy. [Succeeding regimes] added [to it]. ... Every common interest was straightway severed from society ... snatched from the activity of society’s members themselves, and made an object of government activity, from a bridge, a schoolhouse ... to the railways, the national wealth, and the national university of France. ... All revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it. ... As against civil society, the state machine has consolidated its position ... thoroughly.

This is not to detract from Tocqueville’s contribution, however. What he showed was that the growing state power was bound up with the rise of democratic society and, particularly, with the provision of “gratifications” to the people. The New Despotism, if it came, would be insidious, he pointed out, because it would be a mild and benevolent one. Was there then no hope for the survival of freedom in democratic societies? Tocqueville was far from believing that. True to his deep belief that democracy always shows conflicting and clashing tendencies, he now directs attention to democratic values that will help the ongoing struggle for freedom:

The men who live in the democratic ages upon which we are entering have naturally a taste for independence: they are naturally impatient of regulation. ... They are fond of power, but they are prone to despise and hate those who wield it. ... These propensities will always manifest themselves, because they originate in the groundwork of society. For a long time they will prevent the establishment of any despotism, and they will furnish fresh weapons to each succeeding genera­tion that struggles in favor of the liberty of mankind. Let us, then, look forward to the future with that salutary fear which makes men keep watch and ward for freedom, not with that faint and idle terror which depresses and enervates the heart.

     In the last few paragraphs of his great work, Tocqueville takes on one of the most intractable problems of the philosophy of history. Do men have the freedom to decide their own destiny, or are they merely the unknowing agents of some deeper forces? He himself seemed to have pointed to the second conclusion at the very beginning of his work, when he wrote of the advance of equality as a “Providential fact” — that is, as something willed by God. Now his position seems to be more complex:

I am aware that many of my contemporaries maintain that nations are never their own masters here below, and that they necessarily obey some insurmountable and unintelligible power, arising from anterior events, from their race, or from the soil and climate of their country. Such principles are false and cowardly; such principles can never produce aught but feeble men and pusillanimous nations. Providence has not created mankind entirely independent or entirely free. It is true that around every man a fatal circle is traced beyond which he cannot pass. But within the wide verge of that circle he is powerful and free. As it is with man, so with communities.

And Tocqueville concludes with a statement that reveals his ultimate aim in under­taking to analyze democracy in America and in his age:

The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal, but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servi­tude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness.