Essay 100: Among Contemporary European Nations The Sovereign Power Is Increasing Although The Rulers Are Less Stable (Vol. 2 Pt. 4 Ch. 5)

Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner

The essays in our study reference the following edition of Democracy In America: University of Chicago Press – 1st edition translated by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Today’s essay references pages 651 – 661 (stop at chapter 6 heading) of this edition of Democracy in America.

Nearly two centuries after he wrote it De Tocqueville’s conclusion about the democratizing states of Europe in his day— “each step they take toward equality brings them closer to despotism”—still crackles with provocation. De Tocqueville claimed that he was only observing the phenomenon he described, not passing judgment, and yet his description is tinged with the same apprehension that colors the rest of the second volume. 

De Tocqueville described two seemingly contradictory trends that were transforming the nineteenth century world, or at least the United States and Europe. On the one hand, European monarchies and the aristocratic societies that supported them were being dismantled by the forces of equality and democracy rippling out from the Atlantic Revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. The central ideal of this historical sea change, De Tocqueville argued, was equality. To achieve this end nations across the western hemisphere were busy reconfiguring their governments and societies in ways that made their citizens more alike in rights and responsibilities but which also and necessarily increased the centralized nature and power of the governments that secured this sameness. Instead of the archipelago of special rights, privileges, and administrative duties that characterized the aristocratic society of the eighteenth century, in which the local lord, the church, or the city council had authority over discrete geographies and narrow areas of life, but no one authority (even the monarch) could claim authority over all, in the new reality a centralized state took responsibility everywhere and over everything, reaching unmediated into the most mundane areas of each individual citizen’s life. “Everywhere the state comes more and more to direct the least citizens by itself,” De Tocqueville wrote, “and alone to conduct each of them in the least affairs.” Already states had taken responsibility for the education of their citizens, De Tocqueville observed, and even charity, long the province of private associations, the church, or individual largesse, was now coming to be seen as a responsibility of the state. 

While these developments undoubtedly furthered equality, they did not necessarily further individual freedom, and De Tocqueville saw in them the possibility of a creeping authoritarianism. “Most of our princes,” he wrote, “not only want to direct the people as a whole; one would say that they judge themselves responsible of the actions and the individual destinies of their subjects, that they have undertaken to guide and enlighten each of them in the different acts of his life and, if need be, to render him happy despite himself.” To accomplish this, governmental bureaucracies were growing at a frightening pace, becoming both more efficient and more intrusive. Even what De Tocqueville called “industry,” especially engineering, construction, and manufacturing, was developing a reciprocal and dependent relationship with these new democratic governments since economic development accessible to all demanded “roads, canals, ports, and other works of a semipublic nature” in addition to the materials of war on a massive new scale. “Thus it is that in each realm the sovereign becomes the greatest industrialist,” De Tocqueville wrote.

Taking all this in, De Tocqueville believed that in pursuit of equality the citizens of the democratic nations in the nineteenth century were unwittingly creating more powerful, more centralized, and potentially more despotic governments than the ones they had overthrown. The result of this process, he feared, would be that “the same men who from time to time overturn a throne and ride rough shod over kings bend more and more without resistance to the slightest will of a clerk.”

Was De Tocqueville right about the changes in his world, which is now ours? From the vantage point of nearly two hundred years, he seems both prescient and overly pessimistic, depending on where we look. 

De Tocqueville’s fear that centralization in pursuit of equality would actually decrease individual freedom has sometimes proven wrong. For instance, with the passage of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments in the years immediately following the Civil War, the United States government undertook to directly guarantee the rights and freedoms of people recently freed from slavery, bypassing the local and state governments that had traditionally granted rights in the American system. In this case, at least, it seems that centralization and a pursuit of equality unquestionably produced more individual freedom, not less.        

On the other hand, the twentieth century apotheosis of De Tocqueville’s fears can be seen in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, where the ideological pursuit of perfect equality curdled into cold bureaucratic tyranny. Or in Dwight Eisenhower’s famous warning about the threat of a military-industrial complex after World War II, which echoed De Tocqueville’s observation about the growing interdependence of government and industry, especially weapons manufacturing, in the new states of his day. Over-regulation and under-regulation are evergreen issues in American and European politics, and we refer dismissively to “red tape” in some areas of life and work while we demand more government regulation in others. Considering these examples, De Tocqueville seems remarkably farsighted about the direction of the trends he described, which is why we keep reading him. 

Dr. Robert Elder is an associate professor of history at Baylor University, specializing in the American South, the Civil War era, and intellectual and religious history. He is the author of The Sacred Mirror: Evangelicalism, Honor, and Identity in the American South (UNC Press, 2016) and Calhoun: American Heretic (Basic Books, 2021). He is currently working on a book about the Nullification Crisis. 

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