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 439 (Chp. 11 and below) – 444 of this edition of Democracy in America.
A friend once remarked to me that he disliked visiting our nation’s capital because it had come to remind him of imperial Rome. He had in mind the plethora of massive office buildings most constructed to house the large Federal bureaucracies that developed owing to the expansion of the government’s domestic responsibilities beginning in the 1960’s. Through the comparison with the Roman Empire, he was suggesting the incompatibility between massive government and the spirit of genuine republicanism, or self-rule.
This, precisely, is De Tocqueville’s point in his chapter on “Why the Americans at the Same Time Raise Such Little and Such Great Monuments.” Despite having observed in the previous chapter that in democratic times “the monuments of the arts tend to become more numerous and less great,” he immediately adds the exception to that rule. In democracies the size of public monuments tends towards the gigantic, reflecting the fact that while “individuals are very weak …. The state, which represents all” of them and “holds all in its hand, is very strong.”
As evidence De Tocqueville cites Americans’ having laid out “the precincts of an immense city” to house their national capital, even though in De Tocqueville’s time it held only a tiny population. With remarkable foresight, Americans had “uprooted trees for ten leagues around” so as not to obstruct the future expansion of the capital’s population to as many as a million. And not only had they “raised a magnificent palace” to house Congress, they had “given it the pompous name of Capitol” – imitating the Roman title, despite America’s falling far short of the Roman Empire in size and power in 1830. De Tocqueville adds that America’s state governments also engage in “prodigious” architectural undertakings that “would astonish … the great nations of Europe.”
Hence De Tocqueville concludes that while democracy “brings men to make a multitude of minute works,” as noted in the preceding chapter, “it also brings them to raise a few very great monuments,” albeit leaving “nothing” in between. But he denies that a nation’s capacity to build a few grand monuments tells us anything about the people’s “greatness, enlightenment, and real prosperity.” He cites, for instance, the Spanish conquistadores having “found Mexico City full of magnificent temples and vast palaces,” which did not prevent Cortes (Core-tez) “from conquering” the Mexican empire “with six hundred infantry and sixteen horses.” (Of course, Cortes’s success owed something to his superior weaponry, but De Tocqueville’s point remains: the fact that his small army was aided by thousands of indigenous people rebelling against the oppressive rule of the Aztecs can be taken to signify a certain rottenness at the empire’s core.)
De Tocqueville’s point about the disparity between the size of Americans’ public buildings and that of their “narrow” private dwellings reflects his deeper concern: the need to fortify people’s sense of their individual capacities, in opposition to the tendency of a bureaucratized “nanny state” to reduce them to a condition of servility (the central theme of Part IV of Volume II), in which all their needs are cared for by “experts” with little real accountability to the ostensibly sovereign people. Against that threat, De Tocqueville has endorsed such devices as decentralized administration, which leaves the governance of people’s purely local concerns in their own hands; a free but decentralized press, which encourages the circulation of diverse opinions based on empirical experience rather than abstract ideology; the “science” of voluntary association, brought to a pinnacle by Americans; and religions that teach people that they possess immortal, individual souls – in opposition to the endeavor of pantheism to destroy any sense of individuality.
As we look back on De Tocqueville’s concerns from the perspective of almost two centuries since he made his observations, we cannot avoid being struck both by the sagacity of his fears, and the good sense of his recommendations. The population of the national capital has multiplied vastly beyond even what seemed to De Tocqueville to be Americans’ exaggerated expectations – and with it national and state bureaucracies more extensive than what even he may have anticipated. Yet thanks to our federal system, opportunities for Americans to have a say in their governance remain more extensive than they are in France (where dissenters from national policy regularly resort to crippling strikes and obstructionist tactics to have their say). On the other hand the decline of regular religious observance, often supplanted by an extremist “green” worship of nonhuman nature, is eerily reminiscent of pantheism.
It remains to be seen whether Americans will retain a sufficient spirit of individual enterprise and downright stubbornness (“Don’t Tread on Me!”) to resist the dominance of those who claim effectively unlimited power to act on behalf of the people’s “will,” as signified by those grandiose buildings. As a start, De Tocqueville might favor the Trump administration’s endeavor to have new public buildings constructed in the inspiring classical style.
David Lewis Schaefer is professor emeritus of political science at the College of the Holy Cross. He has written and edited numerous works on political philosophy in general, as well as on American political thought. His most notable works include The Political Philosophy of Montaigne (second edition 2019) and Illiberal Justice: John Rawls vs. the American Political Tradition (2007).
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