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 196-199 (stop at heading “On Public Costs Under The Empire of American Democracy”) of this edition of Democracy in America.
An Analysis of Democracy In America (Vol. 1 Pt. 2 Ch. 5, Subchs. 6-7) – The Arbitrary Power Of Magistrates Under The Sway Of American Democracy, Administrative Instability In The United States.
Today, many citizens worry that bureaucrats are unaccountable and unresponsive to the interests of majorities, while other citizens worry that the bureaucracies are too politicized and too open to manipulation. As we can see from these selections of De Tocqueville, this is a long-standing concern for democratic governance. In these chapters, De Tocqueville suggests that democratic systems can be as arbitrary and unstable as despotic states because democratic majorities, just as a despot, can press the administrators to follow their desires. As a result, he argues that democratic majorities do not worry about the power of administrators because they believe that those administrators work on their behalf. If interests of a democratic majority change, they can simply change the actions of the administrators or the administrators themselves. As De Tocqueville states:
In democracies, the majority being able to take power each year out of the hands in which it had entrusted it, also does not fear that it may be abused against itself. A master at making its will known at each instant to those who govern, it would rather abandon them to their own efforts than chain them to an invariable rule that by limiting them would in a way limit itself (196).
As a result, majorities and the administrators they directed could act at will to pursue the majority interests. De Tocqueville worried that this created an instability in society that permitted some potentially dangerous actions by bureaucrats. As he argues:
Nowhere has the law left a greater part to arbitrariness than in democratic republics, because in them, what is arbitrary does not appear fearful. One can even say that the magistrate becomes freer as the right of electing descends further and as the time of the magistracy is more limited (197)
He argued that responsiveness to the majority took precedence over consistent decisions that could form a meaningful rule-of-law.
As an alternative to this arbitrary rule, De Tocqueville suggests that democratic states divide power, as exists in a limited monarchy, which provides both the stability and the energy needed to create the proper balance between effective government and individual liberties. Under this divided plan, both the monarch and democratic majorities will prefer the adoption of regular rules for administrators to follow over the constant tug of war between these divided interests:
The same cause that brings the prince and the people to render the official independent brings them to seek guarantees against the abuse of his independence, so that he does not turn against the authority of the one or the freedom of the other. Both therefore agree on the necessity of tracing out a line of conduct in advance for the official, and see their interest in imposing rules on him from which it is impossible for him to deviate. (198)
The result is the beginning of the arguments in favor of a professionalized administrative state over one that is directly responsible to democratic preferences. Today, the professionalization of the bureaucracy under civil service rules, first established with the Pendleton Act of 1883 and updated by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, significantly reduces this link to democratic change that De Tocqueville feared. But, instead, it introduces the risk of severing the bond to democratic interests that made Americans not fear the magistrate. It may no longer be the case that the government is us in the way that De Tocqueville reflects in this selection.
For De Tocqueville, good administration required a balance of democratic input and knowledge of administrative science that only develops and matures with experience across generations: “the art of administering is surely a science; and all sciences, in order to make progress, need to bind together the discoveries of different generations as they succeed each other.” (198) He argues that the instability in a pure democratic system prevents such learning and growth and that this limited the effectiveness of American governance:
It is very difficult for American administrators to learn anything from one another. Thus, they bring to the conducting of society the enlightenment that they find widespread within it, and not knowledge that is proper to them. Therefore, democracy, pushed to its final limits, harms progress in the art of governing (199)
For De Tocqueville, the success of democracy depends heavily on the education and development of the citizenry. It is not surprising, therefore, that he focused so heavily in Democracy in America on the role of civil society as a training ground essential to the successful self-governance of a democratic republic. The skill sets built in those interactions act as a cross-pressure to the desire for constant and immediate change he associates with pure democracy. Without the voluntary art of association which he observed in his travels through America, such an unstable and arbitrary system would be untenable. These cautions come out clearly in Volume Two of Democracy in America, published just 5 years after these selections from Volume One, and are at the heart of his critique and analysis of The French Revolution in The Old Regime and The Revolution. De Tocqueville was a prescient analyst of the strengths and the challenges of building a properly functioning democratic system. We can learn much by continuing to keep his insights and cautions in mind.
Roberta (Bobbi) Herzberg is a Distinguished Senior Fellow for the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and Emerita Associate Professor in political science at Utah State University (USU), where she served as department head and administrative director of The Institute of Political Economy. Dr. Herzberg currently serves as president of the Society for Development of Austrian Economics and was president of the Public Choice Society from 2014-2016. Dr. Herzberg received her Ph.D. in political economy from Washington University in St. Louis. She writes and speaks regularly on public policy, public choice, institutional analysis, civil society, and the Bloomington School.
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