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• Democracy In America,(1840), Volume Iv
• Third Part a ] Influence of Democracy On Mores Properly So Called
• Chapter 1 A: How Mores Become Milder As Conditions Become Equal
• Chapter 2 A: How Democracy Makes the Habitual Relations of the Americans Simpler and Easier B
• Chapter 3 A: Why the Americans Have So Little Susceptibility In Their Country and Show Such Susceptibility In Ours B
• Chapter 4 A: Consequences of the Three Preceding Chapters
• Chapter 5 A: How Democracy Modifies the Relationships of Servant and Master
• Chapter 6 A: How Democratic Institutions and Mores Tend to Raise the Cost and Shorten the Length of Leases
• Chapter 7 A: Influence of Democracy On Salaries
• Chapter 8 A: Influence of Democracy On the Family B
• Chapter 9 A: Education of Young Girls In the United States B
• Chapter 10 A: How the Young Girl Is Found Again In the Features of the Wife
• Chapter 11 A: How Equality of Conditions Contributes to Maintaining Good Morals In America
• Chapter 12 A: How the Americans Understand the Equality of Man and of Woman B
• Chapter 13 A: How Equality Divides the Americans Naturally Into a Multitude of Small Particular Societies B
• Chapter 14 A: Some Reflections On American Manners B
• Chapter 15 A: of the Gravity of Americans and Why It Does Not Prevent Them From Often Doing Thoughtless Things B
• Chapter 16 A: Why the National Vanity of the Americans Is More Anxious and More Quarrelsome Than That of the English B
• Chapter 17 A: How the Appearance of Society In the United States Is At the Very Same Time Agitated and Monotonous B
• Chapter 18 A: of Honor In the United States and In Democratic Societies 1
• Chapter 19 A: Why In the United States You Find So Many Ambitious Men and So Few Great Ambitions B
• Chapter 20 A: of Positions Becoming an Industry Among Certain Democratic Nations
• Chapter 21 A: Why Great Revolutions Will Become Rare B
• Chapter 22 A: Why Democratic Peoples Naturally Desire Peace and Democratic Armies Naturally Desire War
• Chapter 23 A: Which Class, In Democratic Armies, Is the Most Warlike and the Most Revolutionary
• Chapter 24 A: What Makes Democratic Armies Weaker Than Other Armies While Beginning a Military Campaign and More Formidable When the War Is Prolonged B
• Chapter 25 A: of Discipline In Democratic Armies
• Chapter 26 A: Some Considerations On War In Democratic Societies
• Fourth Part a ] of the Influence That Democratic Ideas and Sentiments Exercise On Political Society B
• Chapter 1: Equality Naturally Gives Men the Taste For Free Institutions
• Chapter 2 A: That the Ideas of Democratic Peoples In Matters of Government Naturally Favor the Concentration of Powers B
• Chapter 3: That the Sentiments of Democratic Peoples Are In Agreement With Their Ideas For Bringing Them to Concentrate Power a
• Chapter 4 A: of Some Particular and Accidental Causes That End Up Leading a Democratic People to Centralize Power Or That Turn Them Away From Doing So B
• Chapter 5: That Among the European Nations of Today the Sovereign Power Increases Although Sovereigns Are Less Stable a
• Chapter 6: What Type of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear a
• Chapter 7 A: Continuation of the Preceding Chapters
• Chapter 8 A: General View of the Subject B
• Notes
• Appendix 1: Journey to Lake Oneida a
• Appendix 2: A Fortnight In the Wilderness a
• Appendix 3: Sects In America a
• Appendix 4: Political Activity In America a
• Appendix 5: Letter of Alexis De Tocqueville to Charles Stoffels
• Appendix 6: Foreword to the Twelfth Edition
• Ouvrages Utilisés Par Tocqueville [ Works Used By Tocqueville ]
• Bibliographie [ Bibliography ]

Fourth Parta ]

Of the Influence That Democratic Ideas and Sentiments Exercise on Political Societyb

Je remplirais mal l’objet de ce livre si, après avoir montré les idées et les sentiments que l’égalité suggère, je ne faisais voir, en terminant, quelle est l’influence générale que ces mêmes sentiments et ces mêmes idées peuvent exercer sur le gouvernement des sociétés humaines.

Pour y réussir, je serai obligé de revenir souvent sur mes pas. Mais j’espère que le lecteur ne refusera pas de me suivre, lorsque des chemins qui lui sont connus le conduiront vers quelque vérité nouvelle.

After having shown the ideas and the sentiments suggested by equality, I would badly fulfill the purpose of this book if, while concluding, I did not show what general influence these same sentiments and these same ideas can exercise on the government of human societies.

To succeed in doing that, I will often be obliged to retrace my steps. But I hope that the reader will not refuse to follow me when roads that he knows lead him toward some new truth.

chapter 1

Equality Naturally Gives Men the Taste for Free Institutions

Equality, which makes men independent of each other, makes them contract the habit and the taste to follow only their will in their personal actions. This complete independence, which they enjoy continually vis-à-vis their equals and in the practice of private life, disposes them to consider all authority with a discontented eye, and soon suggests to them the idea and the love of political liberty. So men who live in these times march on a natural slope that leads them toward free institutions. Take one of them at random; go back, if possible, to his primitive instincts; you will discover that, among the different governments, the one that he conceives first and that he prizes most, is the government whose leader he has elected and whose actions he controls.a

Of all the political effects that equality of conditions produces, it is this love of independence that first strikes our attention and that timid spirits fear even more; and we cannot say that they are absolutely wrong to be afraid, for anarchy has more frightening features in democratic countries than elsewhere.b Since citizens have no effect on each other, at the instant when the national power that keeps them all in their place becomes absent, it seems that disorder must immediately be at its height and that, with each citizen on his own, the social body is suddenly going to find itself reduced to dust.

I am convinced nevertheless that anarchy is not the principal evil that democratic centuries must fear, but the least.

Equality produces, in fact, two tendencies: one leads men directly to independence and can push them suddenly as far as anarchy; the other leads them by a longer, more secret, but surer road toward servitude.

Peoples easily see the first and resist it; they allow themselves to be carried along by the other without seeing it; it is particularly important to show it.

As for me,c far from reproaching equality for the unruliness that it inspires, I praise it principally for that. I admire equality when I see it deposit deep within the mind and heart of each man this obscure notion of and this instinctive propensity for political independence. In this way equality prepares the remedy for the evil to which it gives birth. It is from this side that I am attached to it.

chapter 2a

That the Ideas of Democratic Peoples in Matters of Government Naturally Favor the Concentration of Powersb

[The principal notions that men form in the matter of government are not entirely arbitrary. They are born in each period out of the social state, and the mind receives them rather than creating them.]c

The idea of secondary powers, placed between the sovereign and the subjects, presented itself naturally to the imagination of aristocratic peoples, because these powers included within them individuals or familiesthat birth, enlightenment, wealth kept unrivaled and that seemed destined to command. This same idea is naturally absent from the minds of men in centuries of equality because of opposite reasons; you can only introduce it to their minds artificially, and you can only maintain it there with difficulty; while without thinking about it, so to speak, they conceive the idea of a unique and central power that by itself leads all citizens.

In politics, moreover, as in philosophy and in religion, the minds of democratic peoples receive simple and general ideas with delight. They are repulsed by complicated systems, and they are pleased to imagine a great nation all of whose citizens resemble a single model and are directed by a single power.

After the idea of a unique and central power, the one that presents itself most spontaneously to the minds of men in centuries of equality is the idea of a uniform legislation. As each one of them sees himself as little different from his neighbors, he understands poorly why the rule that is applicable to one man would not be equally applicable to all the others. The least privileges are therefore repugnant to his reason. The slightest dissimilarities in the political institutions of the same people wound him, and legislative uniformity seems to him to be the first condition of good government.

I find, on the contrary, that the same notion of a uniform rule, imposed equally on all the members of the social body, is as if foreign to the human mind in aristocratic centuries. It does not accept it, or it rejects it.

These opposite tendencies of the mind end up, on both sides, by becoming such blind instincts and such invincible habits, that they still direct actions, in spite of particular facts. Sometimes, despite the immense variety of the Middle Ages, perfectly similar individuals were found; this did not prevent the legislator from assigning to each one of them diverse duties and different rights. And, on the contrary, in our times, governments wear themselves out in order to impose the same customs and the same laws on populations that are not yet similar.

As conditions become equal among a people, individuals appear smaller and society seems larger; or rather, each citizen, having become similar to all the others, is lost in the crowd, and you no longer notice anything except the vast and magnificent image of the people itself.d

This naturally gives men of democratic times a very high opinion of the privileges of the society and a very humble idea of the rights of the individual.e They easily agree that the interest of the one is everything and that the interest of the other is nothing. They grant readily enough that the power that represents the society possesses much more enlightenment and wisdom than any one of the men who compose it, and that its duty, as well as its right, is to take each citizen by the hand and to lead him.f

If you really want to examine our contemporaries closely, and to penetrate to the root of their political opinions, you will find a few of the ideas that I have just reproduced, and you will perhaps be astonished to find so much agreement among men who are so often at war with each other.

The Americans believe that, in each state,TN8 social power must emanate directly from the people; but once this power is constituted, they imagine, so to speak, no limits for it; they readily recognize that it has the right to do everything.

As for the particular privileges granted to cities, to families or to individuals, they have lost even the idea. Their minds have never foreseen that the same law could not be applied uniformly to all the parts of the same state and to all the men who inhabit it.

[≠In Europe we reject the dogma of sovereignty of the people that the Americans accept; we give power another origin.≠]g

These same opinions are spreading more and more in Europe; they are being introduced within the very heart of nations that most violently reject the dogma of sovereignty of the people. These nations give power a different origin than the Americans; but they envisage power with the same features. Among all nations, the notion of intermediary power is growing dim and fading.h The idea of a right inherent in certain individuals is disappearing rapidly from the minds of men; the idea of the all-powerful and so to speak unique right of society is coming to take its place. These ideas take root and grow as conditions become more equal and men more similar; equality gives birth to them and they in their turn hasten the progress of equality.j

In France, where the revolution I am speaking about is more advanced than in any other people of Europe, these same opinions have entirely taken hold of the mind. When you listen attentively to the voices of our different parties, you will see that there is not one of them that does not adopt them. Most consider that the government acts badly; but all think that the government must act constantly and put its hand to everything. Even those who wage war most harshly against each other do not fail to agree on this point. The unity, ubiquity, omnipotence of the social power, the uniformity of its rules, form the salient feature that characterizes all the political systems born in our times. You find them at the bottom of the most bizarre utopias.k The human mind still pursues these images when it dreams.

If such ideas present themselves spontaneously to the mind of individuals, they occur even more readily to the imagination of princes.

While the old social state of Europe deteriorates and dissolves, sovereigns develop new beliefs about their abilities and their duties; they understand for the first time that the central power that they represent can and must, by itself and on a uniform plan, administer all matters and all men. This opinion, which, I dare say, had never been conceived before our time by the kings of Europe, penetrates the mind of these princes to the deepest level; it remains firm there amid the agitation of all the other opinions.m [A few perceive it very clearly, everyone glimpses it.]n

So the men of today are much less divided than you imagine; they argue constantly in order to know into which hands sovereignty will be placed; but they agree easily about the duties and about the rights of sovereignty. All conceive the government in the image of a unique, simple, providential and creative power.

All the secondary ideas in political matters are in motion; that one remains fixed, inalterable; it never changes.o Writers and statesmen adopt it; the crowd seizes it avidly; the governed and those who govern agree about pursuing it with the same ardor; it comes first; it seems innate.

So it does not come from a caprice of the human mind, but it is a natural condition of the present state of men.

chapter 3

That the Sentiments of Democratic Peoples Are in Agreement with Their Ideas for Bringing Them to Concentrate Powera

If, in centuries of equality, men easily perceive the idea of a great central power, you cannot doubt, on the other hand, that their habits and their sentiments dispose them to recognize such a power and to lend it support.b The demonstration of this can be done in a few words, since most of the reasons have already been given elsewhere.

Men who inhabit democratic countries, having neither superiors, nor inferiors, nor habitual and necessary associates, readily fall back on themselves and consider themselves in isolation. I have had the occasion to show it at great length when the matter was individualism.

So these men never, except with effort, tear themselves away from their particular affairs in order to occupy themselves with common affairs; their natural inclination is to abandon the care of these affairs to the sole visible and permanent representative of collective interests, which is the State.

Not only do they not naturally have the taste for occupying themselves with public matters, but also they often lack time to do so. Private life is so active in democratic times, so agitated, so full of desires, of work, that hardly any energy or leisure is left to any man for political life.

It is not I who will deny that such inclinations are not invincible, since my principal goal in writing this book has been to combat them. I maintain only that, today, a secret force develops them constantly in the human heart, and that it is enough not to stop them for those inclinations to fill it up.

I have equally had the occasion to show how the growing love of well-being and the mobile nature of property made democratic peoples fear material disorder. The love of public tranquillity is often the only political passion that these peoples retain, and it becomes more active and more powerful among them, as all the others collapse and die; that naturally disposes citizens to give new rights constantly to or to allow new rights to be taken by the central power, which alone seems to them to have the interest and the means to defend them from anarchy while defending itself.c

[<For they do not see around them either individual or corps that is by itself strong enough and lasting enough to defend itself and to defend them.>]

Since, in centuries of equality, no one is obliged to lend his strength to his fellow, and no one has the right to expect great support from his fellow, each man is independent and weak at the very same time. These two states, which must not be either envisaged separately or confused, give the citizen of democracies very contradictory instincts. His independence fills him with confidence and pride among his equals, and his debility makes him, from time to time, feel the need for outside help which he cannot expect from any of his equals, since they are all powerless and cold. In this extreme case, he turns his eyes naturally toward this immense being that alone rises up amidst the universal decline. His needs and, above all, his desires lead him constantly toward this being, and he ends by envisaging it as the sole and necessary support for individual weakness.1

This finally makes understandable what often occurs among democratic peoples, where you see men, who endure superiors with such difficulty, patiently suffer a master, and appear proud and servile at the very same time.

The hatred that men bring to privilege increases as privileges become rarer and smaller, so that you would say that democratic passions become more inflamed at the very time when they find the least sustenance.d I have already given the reason for this phenomenon. No inequality, however great, offends the eye when all conditions are unequal; while the smallest dissimilarity seems shocking amid general uniformity; the sight of it becomes more unbearable as uniformity is more complete. So it is natural that love of equality grows constantly with equality itself; by satisfying it, you develop it.

This immortal and more and more burning hatred, which animates democratic peoples against the least privileges, singularly favors the gradual concentration of all political rights in the hands of the sole representative of the State. The sovereign, necessarily and without dispute above all citizens, does not excite the envy of any one of them, and each one believes that all the prerogatives that he concedes to the sovereign are taken away from his equals.

[<In centuries of equality, each man, living independent of all of his fellows, becomes accustomed to directing his private affairs without constraint. When these same men are united in common, they naturally conceive the idea of and the taste for administering themselves by themselves. So equality leads men toward administrative decentralization, but creates at the same time powerful instincts which turn them away from it.>]e

The man of democratic centuries obeys only with an extreme repugnance his neighbor who is his equal; he refuses to acknowledge in him an enlightenment superior to his own; he mistrusts his neighbor’s justice and regards his power with jealousy; he fears and despises him; he loves to make him feel at every instant the common dependence that they both have on the same master.

Every central power that follows these natural instincts loves equality and favors it; for equality [(of conditions)] singularly facilitates the action of such a power, extends it and assures it.

You can say equally that every central government adores [legislative] uniformity; uniformityf spares it from the examination of an infinity of details with which it would have to be concerned, if the rule had to be made for men, rather than making all men indiscriminately come under the same rule. Thus, the government loves what the citizens love, and it naturally hates what they hate. This community of sentiments, which, among democratic nations, continually unites in the same thought each individual and the sovereign power, establishes between them a secret and permanent sympathy. You pardon the government its faults in favor of its tastes; public confidence abandons the government only with difficulty amid its excesses and its errors, and returns as soon as it is called back. Democratic peoples often hate the agents of the central power; but they always love this power itself. [<Because they consider it as the most powerful instrument that they could use as needed to help them make everyone who escapes from the common rule come back to it.>

I said that in times of equality the idea of intermediary powers set between simple individuals and the government did not naturally present itself to the human mind. I add that men who live in these centuries envisage such powers only with distrust and submit to them only with difficulty.]

Thus, I have come by two different roads to the same end. I have shown that equality suggested to men the thought of a unique, uniform and strong government. I have just shown that it gives them the taste for it; so today nations are tending toward a government of this type. The natural inclination of their mind and heart leads them to it, and it is enough for them not to hold themselves back in order to reach it.

I think that, in the democratic centuries that are going to open up, individual independence and local liberties will always be a product of art. Centralization will be the natural government.

chapter 4a

Of Some Particular and Accidental Causes That End up Leading a Democratic People to Centralize Power or That Turn Them Away from Doing Sob

If all democratic peoples are carried instinctively toward centralization of powers, they are led there in an unequal manner. It depends on particular circumstances that can develop or limit the natural effects of the social state. These circumstances are in very great number; I will only speak about a few.

Among men who have lived free for a long time before becoming equal, the instincts that liberty gave combat, up to a certain point, the tendencies suggested by equality; and although among those men the central power increases its privileges, the individuals there never entirely lose their independence.

But when equality happens to develop among a people who have never known or who, for a long time, have no longer known liberty, as is seen on the continent of Europe, and when the old habits of the nation come to combine suddenly and by a sort of natural attraction with the new habits and doctrines that arise from the social state, all powers seem to rush by themselves toward the center; they accumulate there with a surprising rapidity, and the State all at once attains the extreme limits of its strength, while the individuals allow themselves to fall in a moment to the lowest degree of weakness.

The English who came, three centuries ago, to establish a democratic society in the wilderness of the New World were all accustomed in the mother country to take part in public affairs; they knew the jury; they had freedom of speech and freedom of the press, individual liberty, [added: independent courts], the idea of right and the custom of resorting to it. They carried these free institutions and these manly mores to America, and these institutions and mores sustained them against the invasions of the State.

Among the Americans, it is therefore liberty that is old; equality is comparatively new. The opposite happens in Europe where equality, introduced by absolute power and under the eyes of the kings, had already penetrated the habits of the people long before liberty entered their ideas.

I have said that, among democratic peoples, government naturally presented itself to the human mind only under the form of a unique and central power, and that the notion of intermediary powers was not familiar to it. That is particularly applicable to democratic nations that have seen the principle of equality triumph with the aid of a violent revolution. Since the classes that directed local affairs [<served as intermediary between the sovereign and the people>] disappear suddenly in this tempest, and the confused mass that remains still has neither the organization nor the habits that allow it to take in hand the administration of these same affairs, you see nothing except the State itself which can take charge of all the details of government. Centralization becomes in a way a necessary fact.c

Napoleon [{the national Convention}]d must be neither praised nor blamed for having concentrated in his hands alone all administrative powers; for, after the abrupt disappearance of the nobility and of the upper bourgeoisie, these powers came to him by themselves; it would have been as difficult for him to reject them as to take them. [<He must be reproached for the tyrannical use that he often made of his power, rather than for his power.>]e Such a necessity has never been felt by the Americans, who, not having had a revolution and being from the beginning governed by themselves, have never had to charge the State with temporarily serving them as tutor.f

Thus, among a democratic people, centralization develops not only according to the progress of equality, but also according to the manner in which this equality is established.g

[When conditions have become equal among a nation only following a long and difficult social effort, the sentiments that led to the democratic revolution and those given birth by it subsist for a long time after the revolution. The memory of privileges is joined with the privileges themselves. The trace of former ranks is perpetuated. The people still see the destroyed remnants with hatred and envy, and the nobles envisage the people with terror. You find former adversaries around you on both sides, and you outdo each other throwing yourselves into the arms of the government for fear of falling under the oppression of your neighbors.

This is how the political tendencies that equality imparts are that much stronger among a people as conditions have been more unequal and as equality has had more difficulty becoming established.

The Americans arrived equal on the soil that they occupy. They never had privileges of birth or fortune to destroy. They naturally feel no hatred of some against others. So they subject themselves readily to the administration of those close at hand, because they neither hate nor fear them.]h

At the beginning of a great democratic revolution, and when the war between the different classes has only begun, the people try hard to centralize public administration in the hands of the government, in order to tear the direction of local affairs away from the aristocracy. Toward the end of this same revolution, on the contrary, it is ordinarily the vanquished aristocracy which attempts to deliver to the State the direction of all [{local}] affairs, because it fears the petty tyranny of the people, who have become its equal and often its master.

Thus, it is not always the same class of citizens that applies itself to increasing the prerogatives of power; but as long as the democratic revolution lasts, a class, powerful by numbers or by wealth, is always found in the nation that is led to centralize the public administration by special passions and particular interests, apart from hatred of the government of the neighbor, which is a general and permanent sentiment among democratic peoples. You can see today that it is the lower classes of England that work with all their strength to destroy local independence and to carry the administration of all points from the circumference to the center, while the upper classes try hard to keep this same administration within its ancient limits. I dare to predict that a day will come when you will see an entirely opposite spectacle.j

What precedes makes it well understood why, among a democratic people who has arrived at equality by a long and difficult social effort, the social power must always be stronger and the individual weaker than in a democratic society where, from the beginning, citizens have always been equal. This is what the example of the Americans finally proves.

The men who inhabit the United States have never been separated by any privilege; they have never known the reciprocal relation of inferior and master, and since they do not fear and do not hate one another, they have never known the need to call upon the sovereign to direct the details of their affairs.k The destiny of the Americans is singular; they took from the aristocracy of England the idea of individual rights and the taste for local liberties; and they were able to preserve both, because they did not have to combat aristocracy.

If in all times enlightenment is useful to men for defending their independence, that is above all true in democratic centuries. It is easy, when all men are similar, to establish a unique and omnipotent government; instincts are sufficient. But men need a great deal of intelligence, science and art, in order to organize and to maintain, in the same circumstances, secondary powers, and in order to create, amid the independence and individual weakness of citizens, free associations able to struggle against tyranny without destroying order [{and in order to replace the individual power of a few families with free associations of citizens}].

So concentration of powers and individual servitude will grow, among democratic nations, not only in proportion to equality, but also by reason of ignorance.m

It is true that, in centuries less advanced in knowledge, the government often lacks the enlightenment to perfect despotism, as the citizens lack the enlightenment to escape it. But the effect is not equal on the two sides.

However uncivilized a democratic people may be, the central power that directs it is never completely without enlightenment, because it easily attracts what little enlightenment there is in the country, and because, as needed, it goes outside to seek it. So among a nation that is ignorant as well as democratic, a prodigious difference between the intellectual capacity of the sovereign power and that of each one of its subjects cannot fail to manifest itself. The former ends by easily concentrating all powers in its hands. The administrative power of the State expands constantly, because only the State is skillful enough to administer.n

Aristocratic nations, however little enlightened you suppose them, never present the same spectacle, because enlightenment there is distributed equally between the prince and the principal citizens.

The Pasha who reigns today over Egypt found the population of the country composed of very ignorant and very equal men, and to govern it he appropriated the science and the intelligence of Europe. The particular enlightenment of the sovereign thus coming to combine with the ignorance and the democratic weakness of his subjects, the farthest limit of centralization has been attained without difficulty, and the prince has been able to make the country into his factory and the inhabitants into his workers.o

I believe that the extreme centralization of political power ends by enervating society and thus by weakening the government itself in the long run. But I do not deny that a centralized social force is able to execute easily, in a given time and at a determined point, great enterprises.p That is above all true in war, when success depends much more on the ease that you find in bringing all your resources rapidly to a certain point, than even on the extent of those resources. So it is principally in war that peoples feel the desire and often the need to increase the prerogatives of the central power. All warrior geniuses love centralization, which increases their forces, and all centralizing geniuses love war, which obliges nations to draw all powers into the hands of the State. Thus, the democratic tendency which leads men constantly to multiply the privileges of the State and to limit the rights of individuals is much more rapid and more continuous among democratic peoples who are subject by their position to great and frequent wars, and whose existence can often be put in danger, than among all others.

I have said how the fear of disorder and the love of well-being imperceptibly led democratic peoples to augment the attributions of the central government, the sole power that seems to them by itself strong enough, intelligent enough, stable enough to protect them against anarchy. I hardly need to add that all the particular circumstances that tend to make the state of a democratic society disturbed and precarious increase this general instinct and lead individuals, more and more, to sacrifice their rights to their tranquillity.

So a people is never so disposed to increase the attributions of the central power than when emerging from a long and bloody revolution that, after tearing property from the hands of its former owners, has shaken all beliefs, filled the nation with furious hatreds, opposing interests and conflicting factions. The taste for public tranquillity then becomes a blind passion, and citizens are subject to becoming enamored with a very disordered love of order.

I have just examined several accidents, all of which contribute to aiding the centralization of power. I have not yet spoken about the principal one.

The first of all the accidental causes which, among democratic peoples, can draw the direction of all affairs into the hands of the sovereign is the origin of the sovereign himself and his inclinations.

Men who live in centuries of equality love the central power naturallyq and willingly expand its privileges; but if it happens that this same power faithfully represents their interests and exactly reproduces their instincts, the confidence that they have in it has hardly any limits, and they believe that they are granting to themselves all that they are giving away.r

Drawing administrative powers toward the center will always be less easys and less rapid with kings who are still attached at some point to the old aristocratic order than with new princes, self-made men, who seem to be tied indissolubly to the cause of equality by birth, prejudices, instincts and habits. I do not want to say that the princes of aristocratic origin who live in the centuries of democracy do not seek to centralize. I believe that they apply themselves to that as diligently as all the others. For them, the only advantages of equality are in this direction; but their opportunities are fewer, because the citizens, instead of naturally anticipating their desires, often lend themselves to those desires only with difficulty. In democratic societies, centralization will always be that much greater as the sovereign is less aristocratic: there is the rule.

[I do not believe in the hereditary and imprescriptible rights of princes, and I know how difficult it is to maintain the old families of kings in the midst of new ideas. Ancient dynasties have some particular advantages in centuries of equality, however, that I want to acknowledge.]t

When an old race of kings directs an aristocracy, since the natural prejudices of the sovereign are in perfect accord with the natural prejudices of the nobles, the vices inherent in aristocratic societies develop freely and find no remedy. The opposite happens when the offshoot of a feudal branch is placed at the head of a democratic people. The prince is inclined each day by his education, his habits and his memories, toward sentiments that inequality of conditions suggests; and the people tend constantly, by its social state, toward the mores to which equality gives birth. So it often happens that the citizens seek to contain the central power, much less as tyrannical than as aristocratic; and that they firmly maintain their independence, not only because they want to be free, but above all because they intend to remain equal. [It is in this sense that you can say that old dynasties lead aristocratic peoples to despotism and democratic nations to liberty.

<It is difficult for such a struggle to last for long without leading to a revolution, but as long as it lasts, you cannot deny that it powerfully serves the political education of the democracy.>]

A revolution that overturns an old family of kings, in order to place new men at the head of a democratic people, can temporarily weaken the central power; but however anarchic it seems at first, you must not hesitate to predict that its final and necessary result will be to expand and to assure the prerogatives of this very power.

The first, and in a way the only necessary condition for arriving at centralization of the public power in a democratic society is to love equality or make people believe that you do. Thus, the science of despotism, formerly so complicated, is simplified; it is reduced, so to speak, to a unique principle.u

chapter 5

That among the European Nations of Today the Sovereign Power Increases Although Sovereigns Are Less Stablea

If you come to reflect on what precedes, you will be surprised and frightened to see how, in Europe, everything seems to contribute to increasing indefinitely the prerogatives of the central power and each day to make individual existence weaker, more subordinate and more precarious.

The democratic nations of Europe have all the general and permanent tendencies that lead the Americans toward centralization of powers, and moreover they are subject to a multitude of secondary and accidental causes that the Americans do not know. You would say that each step that they take toward equality brings them closer to despotism.

It is enough to look around us and at ourselves to be convinced of it.

During the aristocratic centuries that preceded ours, the sovereigns of Europe had been deprived of or had let go of several of the rights inherent in their power. Not yet one hundred years ago, among most European nations, almost independent individuals or bodies were found that administered justice, called up and maintained soldiers, collected taxes, and often even made or explained the law. Everywhere the State has, for itself alone, taken back these natural attributions of sovereign power; in everything that relates to government, it no longer puts up with an intermediary between it and the citizens, and it directs the citizens by itself in general affairs. I am very farb from censuring this concentration of power; I am limiting myself to showing it.

In the same period, a great number of secondary powers existed in Europe that represented local interests and administered local affairs. Most of these local authorities have already disappeared; all are tending rapidly to disappear or to fall into the most complete dependency. From one end of Europe to the other, the privileges of lords, the liberties of cities, the provincial administrations are destroyed or are going to be.

Europe has experienced, for a half-century, many revolutions and counter-revolutions that have moved it in opposite directions.c But all these movements are similar on one point: all have shaken or destroyed secondary powers. Local privileges that the French nation had not abolished in countries conquered by it have finally succumbed under the efforts of the princes who defeated France. These princes rejected all the novelties that the [French] Revolution had created among them, except centralization. It is the only thing that they have agreed to keep from it.

What I want to note is that all these diverse rights that in our time have been successively taken away from classes, corporations, men, have not served to raise new secondary powers on a more democratic foundation, but have been concentrated on all sides in the hands of the sovereign. Everywhere the State arrives more and more at directing by itself the least citizens and at alone leading each one of them in the least affairs.1

Nearly all the charitable establishments of old Europe were in the hands of individuals or of corporations; they have all more or less fallen into dependence on the sovereign, and in several countries they are governed by the sovereign. It is the State that has undertaken almost alone to give bread to those who are hungry, relief and a refuge to the sick, work to those without it; it has made itself the almost unique repairer of all miseries.

Education, as well as charity, has become a national affair among most of the peoples of today. The State receives and often takes the child from the arms of its mother in order to entrust it to its agents; it is the State that takes charge of inspiring sentiments in each generation and providing each generation with ideas. Uniformity reigns in studies as in all the rest; there diversity, like liberty, disappears each day.

Nor am I afraid to advance that, among nearly all the Christian nations of today, Catholic as well as Protestant, religion is threatened with falling into the hands of the government.e It is not that sovereigns show themselves very eager to fix dogma themselves;f but more and more they are taking hold of the will of the one who explains dogma; they take away from the cleric his property, assign him a salary, deflect and use for their sole profit the influence that the priest possesses; they make him one of their officials and often one of their servants, and with him they penetrate to the deepest recesses of the soul of each man.2

But that is still only one side of the picture.

Not only has the power of the sovereign expanded, as we have just seen, into the entire sphere of old powers; this is no longer enough to satisfy it; it overflows that sphere on all sides and spreads over the domain that until now has been reserved to individual independence. A multitude of actions which formerly escaped entirely from the control of society has been subjected to it today, and their number increases constantly.g

Among aristocratic peoples, the social power usually limited itself to directing and to overseeing citizens in everything that had a direct and visible connection to the national interest; it willingly abandoned them to their free will in everything else. Among these peoples, the government seemed often to forget that there is a point at which the failings and the miseries of individuals compromise universal well-being, and that sometimes preventing the ruin of an individual must be a public matter.

Democratic nations of our time lean toward an opposite extreme.

It is clear that most of our princes do not want only to direct the whole people; you would say that they consider themselves responsible for the actions and for the individual destiny of their subjects,h that they have undertaken to lead and to enlighten each one of them in the different acts of his life, and as needed, to make him happy despite himself.j

On their side, individuals more and more envisage the social power in the same way; they call it to their aid in all their needs, and at every moment they set their sight on it as on a tutor or on a guide.

I assert that there is no country in Europe in which the public administration has not become not only more centralized, but also more inquisitorial and more detailed; everywhere it penetrates more than formerly into private affairs; it regulates in its own way more actions and smaller actions, and every day it establishes itself more and more beside, around and above each individual in order to assist him, advise him and constrain him.k

Formerly, the sovereign lived from the revenue of his lands or from tax income. It is no longer the same today now that his needs have grown with his power. In the same circumstances in which formerly a prince established a new tax, today we resort to a loan. Little by little the State thus becomes the debtor of most of the rich, and it centralizes in its hands the largest capital.m

It attracts the smallest capital in another way.

As men mingle and conditions become equal, the poor man has more resources, enlightenment and desires. He conceives the idea of bettering his lot, and he seeks to succeed in doing so by savings. So savings give birth each day to an infinite number of small accumulations of capital, slow and successive fruits of work; they increase constantly. But the greatest number would remain unproductive if they stayed scattered. That has given birth to a new philanthropic institution which will soon become, if I am not mistaken, one of our greatest political institutions. Charitable men conceived the thought of gathering the savings of the poor and utilizing the earnings. In some countries, these benevolent associations have remained entirely distinct from the State; but in almost all they tend visibly to merge with it, and there are even a few in which the government has replaced them and undertaken the immense task of centralizing the daily savings of several million workers in a single place and of turning those savings to good account by its hands alone.

Thus, the State draws to itself the money of the rich by borrowing, and by savings banks it disposes as it wills of the pennies of the poor. The wealth of the country rushes constantly toward it and into its hand; wealth accumulates there all the more as equality of conditions becomes greater [{the country is more democratic}]; for among a democratic nation, only the State inspires confidence with individuals, because only it alone seems to them to have some strength and some duration.3

Thus, the sovereign power does not limit itself to directing public fortune; it also gets into private fortunes;n it is the leader of each citizen and often his master, and moreover, it becomes his steward and his cashier.

Not only does the central power alone fill the entire sphere of old powers, expand and go beyond it, but it moves there with more agility, strength and independence than it ever did formerly.

All the governments of Europe have in our time prodigiously perfected administrative science;o they do more things, and they do each thing with more order, rapidity and with less expense; they seem to enrich themselves constantly with all the enlightenment which they have taken from individuals. Each day the princes of Europe hold their delegated agents in a more narrow dependence, and they invent new methods to direct them more closely and to oversee them with less difficulty. It is not enough for them to conduct all affairs by their agents; they undertake to direct the conduct of their agents in all their affairs; so that the public administration depends not only on the same power, it draws itself more and more into the same place and becomes concentrated in fewer hands. The government centralizes its actions at the same time that it increases its prerogatives: double cause of strength.

When you examine the constitution that the judicial power formerly had among most of the nations of Europe, two things are striking: the independence of this power and the extent of its attributions.

Not only did the courts of justice decide nearly all the quarrels among individuals; in a great number of cases, they served as arbiters between each individual and the State.

I do not want to speak here about the administrative and political attributions that the courts had usurped in some countries, but about the judicial attributions that they possessed in all. Among all the peoples of Europe, there were and there still are many individual rights, most related to the general right of property, which were placed under the safeguard of the judge and which the State could not violate without the permission of the former.

It is this semi-political power which principally distinguished the courts of Europe from all the others; for all peoples have had judges, but all have not given judges the same privileges.

If we now examine what is happening among the democratic nations of Europe which are called free, as well as among the others, we see that on all sides, alongside these courts, other more dependent ones are being created, whose particular purpose is to decide in exceptional instances the litigious questions that can arise between the public administration and the citizens. The old judicial power is left with its independence, but its jurisdiction is narrowed, and more and more the tendency is to make it only an arbiter between particular interests.p

The number of these special courts increases constantly, and their attributions grow. So the government escapes more every day from the obligation to have its will and its rights sanctioned by another power. Not able to do without judges, it wants, at least, to choose its judges itself and to hold them always in its hand; that is to say, between it and individuals, it places still more the image of justice rather than justice itself.q

Thus, it is not enough for the State to draw all affairs to itself; it also ends more and more by deciding all of these by itself without control and without recourse.4

There is among the modern nations of Europe one great cause that, apart from all those that I have just pointed out, contributes constantly to expand the action of the sovereign power or to augment its prerogatives; we have not taken enough notice of it. This cause is the development of industry, which the progress of equality favors.r

[<The goods created by industry are rightly regarded by all enlightened nations as particularly appropriate to be taxed. Thus, as industry develops, you see new taxes arise, and these taxes are in general more complicated, more difficult and more exacting to collect than all the others.s

It must be remarked on the other hand that . . .>]t

Industry usually gathers a multitude of men in the same place; it establishes new and complicated relationships among them. It exposes them to great and sudden shifts between abundance and poverty, during which public tranquillity is threatened. It can happen finally that these works compromise the health and even the lives of those who profit from them or of those who devote themselves to them. Thus, the industrial class has more need to be regulated, supervised and restrained than all the other classes, and it is natural that the attributions of the government grow with it.

This truth is generally applicable; but here is what relates more particularly to the nations of Europe.

In the centuries that have preceded those in which we live, the aristocracy possessed the land and was able to defend it. So landed property was surrounded by guarantees, and its owners enjoyed a great independence. That created laws and habits that have been perpetuated despite the division of lands and the ruin of the nobles; and today the landowners and farmers are still, of all citizens, those who escape most easily from the control of the social power.

In these same aristocratic centuries, where all the sources of our history are found, personal property had little importance and its owners were despised and weak; the industrialists formed an exceptional class in the middle of the aristocratic world. Since they did not have assured patronage, they were not protected, and often they were not able to protect themselves.u

So it became a habit to consider industrial property as a property of a particular nature, which did not merit the same guarantees as property in general, and to consider the industrialists as a small, separate class in the social order, whose independence had little value, and as a class that it was fitting to abandon to the regulatory passion of princes. If, in fact, you open the codes of the Middle Ages, you are astonished to see how, in these centuries of individual independence, industry was constantly regulated by kings, up to the smallest details; on this point, centralization is as active and as detailed as it could be.

Since this time, a great revolution has taken place in the world; industrial property, which was only in germ, has developed; it covers Europe; the industrialv class has expanded; it has enriched itself from the remnants of all the others; it has grown in number, in importance, in wealth; it grows constantly; nearly all those who are not part of it are connected to it, at least at some point; after having been the exceptional class, it threatens to become the principal class and, so to speak, the sole class;w but the political ideas and habits to which it formerly gave birth have remained. These ideas and these habits have not changed, because they are old, and then because they are in perfect harmony with the new ideas and general habits of the men of our times.x

So industrial property does not augment its rights with its importance. The industrial class does not become less dependent by becoming more numerous; but you would say, on the contrary, that it carries despotism within it, and that despotism expands naturally as it develops.5

In proportion as the nation becomes more industrial, it feels a greater need for roads, canals, ports and other works of a semi-public nature, which facilitate the acquisition of wealth; and in proportion as the nation is more democratic, individuals experience more difficulty in executing such works, and the State more ease in doing them. I am not afraid to assert that the manifest tendency of all the sovereigns of our time is to undertake alone the execution of such enterprises; in that way, they enclose populations each day within a more narrow dependence.

On the other hand, as the power of the State increases and as its needs augment, the State itself consumes an always greater quantity of industrial products, which it fabricates ordinarily in its arsenals and its factories. In this way, in each kingdom, the sovereign power becomes the greatest industrialist;z it draws to and retains in its service a prodigious number of engineers, architects, mechanics and artisans.a

It is not only the first of industrialists; it tends more and more to make itself the leader or rather the master of all the others.b

Since citizens have become weak while becoming more equal,c they can do nothing in industry without associating; now, the public power naturally wants to place these associations under its control.

It must be recognized that these kinds of collective beings, which are called associations, are stronger and more formidable than a simple individual can be, and that they have less responsibility than the latter for their own actions; the result is that it seems reasonable to allow to each one of them less independence from the social power than would be allowed for an individual.

Sovereigns have that much more inclination to act in this way since it suits their tastes. Among democratic peoples it is only by association that the resistance of citizens to the central power can come about; consequently the latter never sees associations that are not under its control except with disfavor; and what is very worth noting is that, among democratic peoples, citizens often envisage these same associations, which they need so much, with a secret sentiment of fear and jealousy which prevents them from defending them. The power and the duration of these small particular societies, amid the general weakness and instability, astonishes them and worries them, and citizens are not far from considering as dangerous privileges the free use that each association makes of its natural powers.

All these associations that are arising today are, moreover, so many new persons, for whom time has not consecrated rights and who enter into the world at a period when the idea of particular rights is weak, and when the social power is without limits; it is not surprising that associations lose their liberty at birth.

Among all the peoples of Europe, there are certain associations that can be formed only after the State has examined their statutes and authorized their existence. Among several, efforts are being made to extend this rule to all associations. You see easily where the success of such an undertaking would lead.

If the sovereign power had once the general right to authorize, on certain conditions, associations of all types, it would not take long to claim that of overseeing them and of directing them, so that the associations would not able to evade the rule that it had imposed on them. In this way, the State, after making all those who desire to associate dependent on it, would make all those who have associated dependent as well, that is to say, nearly all the men who are alive today.

The sovereign powers thus appropriate more and more, and put to their use the greatest part of this new force that industry creates today in the world. Industry leads us, and they lead industry.d

[As for those who still work alone in the industrial world, their number and above all their importance is constantly decreasing; and for a long time, moreover, the government has exercised the right to regulate them as it pleases and has imposed on them each day new laws of which the government itself alone is the administrator and the interpreter.

<≠Perhaps you will find that I have expanded too much on this last part. Its importance will be my excuse.

The progress of equality and the development of industry are the two greatest facts of our times.

I wanted to show how both contributed to enlarge the sphere of the central power and to restrict individual independence each day within the narrowest limits.≠>]e

I attach so much importance to all that I have just said that I am tormented with the fear of having detracted from my thought by wanting to make it clearer.

So if the reader finds that the examples cited to support my words are insufficient or badly chosen; if he thinks that in some place I have exaggerated the progress of the social power, and that on the contrary I have limited beyond measure the sphere in which individual independence still moves, I beg him to abandon the book for a moment and to consider in his turn by himself the matters that I have undertaken to show him. Let him examine attentively what is happening each day among us and beyond us; let him question his neighbors; let him finally consider himself; I am very much mistaken if he does not arrive, without a guide and by other paths, at the point where I wanted to lead him.

[He will discover that the various rights that today have been successively wrested from classes, corporations, men, instead of serving to raise new secondary powers on another more democratic foundation, have almost all collected in the sole hands of the sovereign, that everywhere the public administration has become more clever, more intelligent and stronger, that the individual has become more isolated, more inexperienced, and weaker relative to the public administration, and that finally the State, whatever its representative, has placed itself more every day next to and above each citizen in order to instruct him, guide him, aid him and constrain him.]f

He will notice that, during the half-century that has just gone by, centralization has grown everywhere in a thousand different fashions. Wars, revolutions, conquests have served its development; all men have worked to increase it.g During this same period, when men have with a prodigious rapidity succeeded each other at the head of affairs, their ideas, their interests, their passions have varied infinitely; but all have wanted to centralize in some ways. The instinct for centralization has been like the sole immobile point amid the singular mobility of their existence and their thoughts.h

And when the reader, after examining this detail of human affairs, will want to embrace the vast picture as a whole, he will remain astonished.

On the one hand, the firmest dynasties are shaken or destroyed; on all sides peoples escape violently from the dominion of their laws; they destroy or limit the authority of their lords or of their princes; all the nations that are not in revolution seem at least restless and unsettled; the same spirit of revolt animates them. And, on the other, in this same time of anarchy and among these same peoples so unruly, the social power constantly increases its prerogatives; it becomes more centralized, more enterprising, more absolute, more extensive. The citizens fall under the control of the public administration at every instant; they are carried imperceptibly and as if without their knowledge to sacrifice to the public administration some new parts of their individual independence, and these same men who from time to time overturn a throne and trample kings underfoot, bow more and more, without resistance, to the slightest will of a clerk.

So therefore, two revolutions seem to be taking place today in opposite directions: one continually weakens power, and the other constantly reinforces it. In no other period of our history has it appeared either so weak or so strong.

But when you finally come to consider the state of the world more closely, you see that these two revolutions are intimately linked to each other, that they come from the same source, and that, after having had a different course, they finally lead men to the same place.

I will not be afraid again to repeat one last time what I have already said or pointed out in several places of this book. We must be very careful about confusing the very fact of equality with the revolution that finally introduces it into the social state and into the laws; that is the reason for nearly all the phenomena that astonish us.

All the ancient political powers of Europe, the greatest as well as the least, were established in the centuries of aristocracy, and they more or less represented or defended the principle of inequality and of privilege. To make the new needs and interests suggested by growing equality prevail in the government, it was therefore necessary for the men of our times to overturn or restrain the ancient powers. That has led them to make revolutions and has inspired in a great number of them this wild taste for disorder and for independence to which all revolutions, whatever their objective, always give birth.

I do not believe that there is a single country in Europe where the development of equality has not been preceded or followed by some violent changes in the state of property and of persons, and almost all these changes have been accompanied by a great deal of anarchy and license, because they were done by the least civilized portion of the nation against the portion that was most civilized.

From that have come the two opposite tendencies that I previously showed. As long as the democratic revolution was in its heat, the men occupied with destroying the ancient aristocratic powers that fought against it appeared animated by a great spirit of independence; and as the victory of equality became more complete, they abandoned themselves little by little to the natural instincts that arose from this same equality, and they reinforced and centralized the social power. They had wanted to be free in order to be able to make themselves equal; and as equality became more established with the help of liberty, it made liberty more difficult for them.

These two states have not always been successive. Our fathers have shown how a people could organize an immense tyranny within itself at the very moment when it escaped from the authority of the nobles and braved the power of all the kings, teaching the world at the same time the way to conquer its independence and to lose it.

The men of today notice that the old powers are collapsing on all sides; they see all the old influences dying, all the old barriers falling; that disturbs the judgment of the most able; they pay attention only to the prodigious revolution which is taking place before their eyes, and they believe that humanity is going to fall forever into anarchy. If they considered the final consequences of this revolution, they would perhaps imagine other fears.

As for me, I do not trust, I confess, the spirit of liberty which seems to animate my contemporaries; I see well that the nations of today are turbulent; but I do not find clearly that they are liberal, and I am afraid that at the end of these agitations, which make all thrones totter, sovereigns will find themselves stronger than they were [I am afraid finally that in this century of license, everything is being prepared for the enslavement of the generations to come].

chapter 6

What Type of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Feara

I had noticed during my stay in the United States that a democratic social state similar to that of the Americans could offer singular opportunities for the establishment of despotism,b and I had seen on my return to Europe how most of our princes had already made use of the ideas, sentiments and needs that arose from that social state, in order to expand the circle of their power.

That led me to believe that Christian nations would end perhaps by suffering some oppression similar to that which weighed formerly on several of the peoples of antiquity.c

A more detailed examination of the subject and five years of new meditations have not lessened my fears, but they have changed their object.

We have never in past centuries seen a sovereign so absolute and so powerful that he undertook to administer by himself, and without the help of secondary powers, all the parts of a great empire; there is none who attempted to subject all his subjects indiscriminately to the details of a uniform rule, or who descended to the side of each one of his subjects in order to rule over him and to lead him. The idea of such an undertaking had never occurred to the human mind, and if a man ever happened to imagine it, the insufficiency of enlightenment, the imperfection of administrative procedures, and above all the natural obstacles that inequality of conditions created would have soon stopped him in the execution of such a vast design.

We see that in the time of the greatest power of the Caesars, the different peoples who inhabited the Roman world had still kept diverse customs and mores. Although subjected to the same monarch, most of the provinces were administered separately; they were full of powerful and active municipalities, and although all the government of the empire was concentrated in the hands of the emperor alone, and although he remained always, as needed, the arbiter of all things, the details of social life and of individual existence ordinarily escaped his control.

The emperors possessed, it is true, an immense power without counterbalance, which allowed them to give themselves freely to their bizarre inclinations and to use the entire strength of the State to satisfy them; they often happened to abuse this power in order arbitrarily to take away a citizen’s property or his life. Their tyranny weighed prodigiously on a few; but it did not extend to a great number; it was tied to a few great principal matters and neglected the rest; it was violent and limited.d

It seems that, if despotism came to be established among the democratic nations of today, it would have other characteristics; it would be more extensive and milder, and it would degrade men without tormenting them.

I do not doubt that, in centuries of enlightenment and equality such as ours, sovereigns might have succeeded more easily in uniting all public powers in their hands alone, and in penetrating more habitually and more deeply into the circle of private interests, than any of those of antiquity were ever able to do. But this same equality, which facilitates despotism, tempers it; we have seen how, as men are more similar and more equal, public mores become more humane and milder; when no citizen has a great power or great wealth, tyranny lacks, in a way, opportunity and theater. Since all fortunes are mediocre, passions are naturally contained, imagination limited, pleasures simple. This universal moderation moderates the sovereign himself and stops within certain limits the disordered impulse of his desires.

Apart from these reasons drawn from the very nature of the social state, I could add many others that would take me beyond my subject; but I want to keep myself within the limits that I have set for myself.

Democratic governments will be able to become violent and even cruel in certain moments of great agitation and great dangers; but these crises will be rare and passing.

When I think about the petty passions of the men of our times, about the softness of their mores, about the extent of their enlightenment, about the purity of their religion, about the mildness of their morality, about their painstaking and steady habits, about the restraint that they nearly all maintain in vice as in virtue, I am not afraid that they will find in their leaders tyrants, but rather tutors.

So I think that the type of oppression by which democratic peoples are threatened will resemble nothing of what preceded it in the world; our contemporaries cannot find the image of it in their memories. I seek in vain myself for an expression that exactly reproduces the idea that I am forming of it and includes it; [<the thing that I want to speak about is new, and men have not yet created the expression which must portray it.>] the old words of despotism and of tyranny do not work. The thing is new, so I must try to define it, since I cannot name it.e

I want to imagine under what new features despotism could present itself to the world; I see an innumerable crowd of similar and equal men who spin around restlessly, in order to gain small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.f Each one of them, withdrawn apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others; his children and his particular friends form for him the entire human species;g as for the remainder of his fellow citizens, he is next to them, but he does not see them; he touches them without feeling them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone, and if he still has a family, you can say that at least he no longer has a country.h

Above those men arises an immense and tutelary power that alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyment and of looking after their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-sighted and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like it, it had as a goal to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary it seeks only to fix them irrevocably in childhood; it likes the citizens to enjoy themselves, provided that they think only about enjoying themselves.j It works willingly for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent for it and the sole arbiter; it attends to their security, provides for their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, settles their estates, divides their inheritances;k how can it not remove entirely from them the trouble to think and the difficulty of living?

This is how it makes the use of free will less useful and rarer every day; how it encloses the action of the will within a smaller space and little by little steals from each citizen even the use of himself.m Equality has prepared men for all these things; it has disposed men to bear them and often even to regard them as a benefit.

After having thus taken each individual one by one into its powerful hands, and having molded him as it pleases, the sovereign power extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules, which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot break through to go beyond the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; [<≠in certain moments of great passions and great dangers, the sovereign power becomes suddenly violent and arbitrary. Habitually it is moderate, benevolent, regular and humane≠>] it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy, it prevents birth; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupifies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.n

I have always believed that this sort of servitude, regulated, mild and peaceful, of which I have just done the portrait, could be combined better than we imagine with some of the external forms of liberty, and that it would not be impossible for it to be established in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people.o

[I suppose that a democratic nation, after destroying within it all the secondary powers, establishes in its midst a very inquisitorial, very extensive, very centralized, very powerful executive power, that it confers on this power the right to conduct all the details of public affairs and to lead a part of private affairs, that it put [sic ] individuals in a strict and daily dependence on this power, but that it makes this executive power itself depend on an elected legislature which, without governing, traces the principal rules of the government.

<I go still further and I suppose that the administration, instead of being alongside the legislative chambers, is in the very legislature, as was seen in France at the time of the Convention, so that the same elected power makes the law and executes it even in its smallest details.>

All that means, if I am not mistaken, that after allowing the sovereign power as a master to direct each citizen [v: particular wills] and to bend him every day as it pleases, the sovereign itself is subjected from time to time to the general will [volontés générales: (Translator)] of the nation.]

Our contemporaries are incessantly tormented by two hostile passions: they feel the need to be led and the desire to remain free. Unable to destroy either the one or the other of these opposite instincts, they work hard to satisfy both at the same time. They imagine a unique, tutelary, omnipotent power, but elected by the citizens. They combine centralizationp and sovereignty of the people. That gives them some relief. They console themselves about being in tutelage by thinking that they have chosen their tutors themselves. Each individual endures being bound, because he sees that it is not a man or a class, but the people itself that holds the end of the chain.

In this system, the citizens emerge for a moment from dependency in order to indicate their master, and return to it.q

There are many men today who accommodate themselves very easily to this type of compromise between administrative despotism and sovereignty of the people, and who think they have guaranteed the liberty of individuals when it is to the national power that they deliver that liberty. That is not enough for me. The nature of the master is much less important to me than the obedience.

I will not deny, however, that such a constitution is infinitely preferable to one that, after concentrating all powers, would put them in the hands of an unaccountable man or body. Of all the different forms that democratic despotism could take, the latter would assuredly be the worst.

When the sovereign is elected or closely supervised by a legislature truly elected and independent, the oppression that it can make individuals suffer is sometimes greater; but the oppression is always less degrading because each citizen, when he is being hindered and when he is reduced to powerlessness, can still imagine that by obeying he is only submitting to himself, and that it is to one of his desires that he is sacrificing all the rest.r

I understand equally that, when the sovereign represents the nation and depends on it, the strength and the rights that are taken from each citizen do not serve only the leader of the State, but profit the State itself, and that individuals gain some advantage from the sacrifice of their independence that they have made to the public.

[I understand also that when public opinion draws certain limits and can keep the sovereign power within them, tyranny properly speaking is little to be feared, or at least it can never become general. Thus it is not the tyranny of the social power that is the most to fear, but its regular use.]s

To create a national representation in a very centralized country, is therefore to diminish the evil that extreme centralization can produce, but not to destroy it.t

I see clearly that, in this way, individual intervention is kept in the most important affairs; but it is no less suppressed in the small ones and the particular ones.u We forget that it is dangerous, above all, to enslave men in the detail. I would, for my part, be led to believe liberty less necessary in the great things than in the least, if I thought that the one could ever be assured without possessing the other.

Subjection in small affairs manifests itself every day and makes itself felt indiscriminately by all citizens. It does not drive them to despair; but it thwarts them constantly and leads them to relinquish the use of their will [and finally to give up on themselves]. It thus extinguishes their spirit little by little, and enervates their souls; while the obedience that is due only in a small number of very grave, but very rare circumstances, displays servitude only now and then, and makes it weigh only on certain men. In vain will you charge these same citizens, whom you have made so dependent on the central power, with choosing from time to time the representatives of this power; this use so important, but so short and so rare, of their free will, will not prevent them from losing little by little the ability to think, to feel and to act by themselves, and from thus falling gradually below the level of humanity.v

I add that they will soon become incapable of [properly] exercising the great and sole privilege remaining to them. Democratic peoples who have introduced liberty in the political sphere, at the same time that they increased despotism in the administrative sphere, have been led to very strange peculiarities.w If small affairs, in which simple good sense can suffice, must be managed, they consider that the citizens are incapable of it; if it is a matter of the government of the whole State, they entrust these citizens with immense prerogatives; they make them alternately the playthings of the sovereign and its masters, more than kings and less than men. After having exhausted all the different systems of election, without finding one that suits them, they are surprised and still search; as if the evil that they notice were not due to the constitution of the country much more than to that of the electoral body.

It is, in fact, difficult to imagine how men who have entirely given up the habit of directing themselves, could succeed in choosing well those who should lead them; and it cannot be believed that a liberal, energetic and wise government can ever come out of the votes of a people of servants.x

A constitution that would be republican at the head, and ultra-monarchical in all the other parts has always seemed to me an ephemeral monster. The vices of those who govern and the imbecility of the governed would not take long to lead them to ruin; and the people, tired of its representatives and of itself, would create freer institutions, or would soon return to stretching out at the feet of a single master.y

chapter 7a

Continuation of the Preceding Chapters

I believe that it is easier to establish an absolute and despotic government among a [democratic] people where conditions are equal than among another, and I think that, if such a government were once established among such a people, not only would it oppress men, but in the long run it would rob from each of them some of the principal attributes of humanity.b

So despotism seems to me particularly to be feared in democratic ages.

I would, I think, have loved liberty in all times; but I feel myself inclined to adore it in the times in which we live.

I am persuaded, on the other hand, that in the centuries which we are entering, all those who try to base liberty on privilege and on aristocracy will fail. All those who want to attract and keep authority within a single class will fail. There is today no sovereign power clever enough and strong enough to establish despotism by reestablishing permanent distinctions among its subjects;c nor is there any legislator so wise and so powerful who is able to maintain free institutions if he does not take equality as first principle and as symbol. So all those among our contemporaries who want to create or to assure the independence and dignity of their fellows must appear as friends of equality; and the only means worthy of them of appearing so is to be so: the success of their holy enterprise depends on it.d

Thus, it is not a matter of reconstructing an aristocratic society, but of making liberty emerge from within the democratic society in which God makes us live.

These two first truths seem to me simple, clear and fertile, and they lead me naturally to consider what type of free government can be established among a people in which conditions are equal.

It results from the very constitution of democratic nations and from their needs that, among them, the power of the sovereign must be more uniform, more centralized, more extensive, more penetrating, more powerful than elsewhere.e Society there is naturally more active and stronger; the individual, more subordinate and weaker. The one does more; the other less; that is inevitable.f

So in democratic countries you must not expect the circle of individual independence ever to be as wide as in countries of aristocracy. But that is not to be desired; for among aristocratic nations, society is often sacrificed to the individual, and the prosperity of the greatest number to the grandeur of a few.

It is at the very same time necessary and desirable that the central power that directs a democratic people be active and powerful. It is not a matter of making it weak or indolent, but only of preventing it from abusing its agility and strength.g

What contributed the most to assure the independence of individuals in aristocratic centuries is that the sovereign power did not take charge alone of governing and administering the citizens; it was obliged to leave a part of this concern to the members of the aristocracy; so that the social power, always divided, never weighed entirely and in the same way on every man.h

Not only did the sovereign power not do everything by itself, but most of the officers who acted in its place, since they drew their power from the fact of their birth and not from it, were not constantly in its hand. It could not at any moment create them or destroy them, depending on its caprices, and bend them all uniformly to its least desires. That also guaranteed the independence of individuals.

I also understand that today you cannot resort to the same means, but I see democratic procedures that replace them.j

Instead of giving to the sovereign alone all the administrative powers that were taken from the corporation or from the nobles, you can entrust a part of them to secondary bodies formed temporarily out of simple citizens; in this way, the liberty of individuals will be surer, without their equality being less.

The Americans, who are not as attached as we to words, have kept the name of county for the largest of their administrative districts; but they have in part replaced the county by a provincial assemblyk [chosen freely by the inhabitants themselves].m

I will admit without difficulty that in a period of equality like ours, it would be unjust and unreasonable to institute hereditary officials; but nothing prevents substituting for them, to a certain measure, elected officials. Election is a democratic expedient that assures the independence of the official vis-à-vis the central power, as much as and more than heredity can do among aristocratic peoples.

Aristocratic countries are full of rich and influential individuals who know how to be self-sufficient and who are not easily or secretly oppressed; and the latter keep power within the general habits of moderation and restraint [<while in democratic countries each citizen taken in isolation cannot offer any resistance and does not ever succeed in attracting the eyes of the public to the evils that tyranny makes him suffer.>]

I know well that democratic countries do not naturally present similar individuals; but there you can artificially create something analogous.

I believe firmly that you cannot establish an aristocracyn again in the world; but I think that simple citizens by associating together can constitute very wealthy, very influential, very strong beings, in a word aristocratic persons.o

[<Thus, in whatever direction I look, I discover association as the most powerful remedy for the evils with which equality threatens us.>]

In this manner several of the greatest political advantages of aristocracy would be obtained, without its injustices or its dangers. A political, industrial, commercial, or even scientific and literary association is an enlightened and powerful citizen whom you cannot bend at will or oppress in the shadow, and who, by defending its particular rights against the demands of power, saves common liberties.

In times of aristocracy, each man is always bound in a very tight way to several of his fellow citizens, so that you cannot attack the former without the others running to his aid. In centuries of equality, each individual is naturally isolated; he has no hereditary friends whose help he can require, no class whose sympathies for him are assured; he is easily set apart, and he is trampled underfoot with impunity.p Today, a citizen who is oppressed has therefore only one means of defending himself; it is to address himself to the whole nation, and if it is deaf to him, to humanity; he has only one means to do it, it is the press. Thus liberty of the press is infinitely more precious among democratic nations than among all others; it alone cures most of the evils that equality can produce. Equality isolates and weakens men; but the press places beside each one of them a very powerful weapon, which the weakest and most isolated can use. Equality takes away from each individual the support of those close to him; but the press allows him to call to his aid all his fellow citizens and all those similar to him. Printing hastened the progress of equality, and it is one of its best correctives.

I think that men who live in aristocracies can, if necessary, do without liberty of the press; but those who inhabit democratic countries cannot do so. [<For the latter, between independence and servitude, I see hardly anything except the press.>] To guarantee the personal independence of the latter, I do not trust great political assemblies, parliamentary prerogatives, the proclamation of sovereignty of the people.

All these things, up to a certain point, fit with individual servitude; but this servitude cannot be complete if the press is free. The press is, par excellence, the democratic instrument of liberty.

I will say something analogous about the judicial power.q

It is the essence of the judicial power to occupy itself with particular interests and to fix its eyes on the small matters that are exposed to its view; it is also the essence of this power not to come by itself to the help of those who are oppressed, but to be constantly at the disposal of the most humble man among them. The latter, however weak you suppose him to be, can always force the judge to listen to his complaint and to respond to it: that results from the very constitution of the judicial power.

So such a power is especially applicable to the needs of liberty, in a time when the eye and the hand of the sovereign are introduced constantly into the most minute details of human actions, and when individuals, too weak to protect themselves, are too isolated to be able to count on the help of those like them. The strength of the courts has been, in all times, the greatest guarantee that can be offered to individual independence, but that is true above all in democratic centuries; particular rights and interests are always in danger there, if the judicial power does not grow and expand as conditions become equal.

Equality suggests to men several tendencies very dangerous for liberty, and the legislator must always keep his eyes open to them. I will only recall the principal ones.

Men who live in democratic centuries do not easily understand the utility of forms;r they feel an instinctive disdain for them. I spoke about the reasons for this elsewhere. Forms excite their scorn and often their hatred. Since they usually aspire only to easy and present enjoyments, they throw themselves impetuously toward the object of each one of their desires; the least delays lead them to despair. This temperament, which they bring to political life, sets them against forms which slow or stop them each day in some of their desires.

This disadvantage that men of democracies find in forms is, however, what makes the latter so useful to liberty, their principal merit being to serve as a barrier between the strong and the weak, those who govern and the governed, to slow the first and to give to the second the time for them to figure things out. Forms are more necessary as the sovereign power is more active and more powerful and as individuals become more indolent and more feeble. Thus democratic peoples naturally need forms more than other peoples, and naturally they respect them less.s That merits very serious attention.

There is nothing more miserable than the superb disdain of most of our contemporaries for questions of forms; for today the smallest questions of forms have acquired an importance that they had not had until now. Several of the greatest interests of humanity are connected with it.

I think that, if the statesmen who lived in aristocratic centuries could sometimes scorn forms with impunity and often rise above them, those who lead peoples today must consider the least form with respect and neglect it only when an imperious necessity forces them to do so. In aristocracies, you had superstition for forms; we must have an enlightened and thoughtful cult of them.

Another instinct very natural to democratic peoples, and very dangerous, is that which leads them to scorn individual rights and to take them into little account.

Men are in general attached to a right and show it respect by reason of its importance or of the long use that they have made of it. Individual rights which are found among democratic peoples are ordinarily of little importance, very recent and very unstable; that means that they are often easily sacrificed and violated almost always without regrets.

Now it happens that, in this same time and among these same nations in which men conceive a natural scorn for the rights of individuals, the rights of the society expand naturally and become stronger; that is to say that men become less attached to particular rights, at the moment when it would be most necessary to keep them and to defend the few of them that remain.t

So it is above all in the democratic times in which we find ourselves that the true friends of liberty and of human grandeur must, constantly, stand up and be ready to prevent the social power from sacrificing lightly the particular rights of some individuals to the general execution of its designs. In those times no citizen is so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed, or individual rights of so little importance that you can surrender to arbitrariness with impunity. The reason for it is simple. When you violate the particular right of an individual in a time when the human mind is penetrated by the importance and the holiness of the rights of this type, you do harm only to the one you rob. But to violate such a right today is to corrupt the national mores profoundly and to put the entire society at risk, because the very idea of these kinds of rights tends constantly among us to deteriorate and become lost.

[<I find as well and for entirely similar reasons that in democratic centuries, above all, sovereigns must watch themselves with the greatest care in order to repress the natural tendency which leads them to sacrifice a particular right, however small it is, to the general execution to their designs.>]

There are certain habits, certain ideas, certain vices that belong to the state of revolution, and that a long revolution cannot fail to engender and to generalize, whatever its character, its objective and its theater are.

When whatever nation has several times in a short expanse of time changed leaders, opinions and laws, the men who compose it end by contracting the taste for movement and by becoming accustomed to all movements taking place rapidly and with the aid of force. They then naturally conceive a contempt for forms, whose impotence they see every day, and only with impatience do they bear the dominion of rules, which have been evaded so many times before their eyes.

Since the ordinary notions of equity and morality no longer suffice to explain and justify all the novelties to which the revolution gives birth each day, you latch onto the principle of social utility, you create the dogma of political necessity; and you become readily accustomed to sacrificing particular interests without scruples and to trampling individual rights underfoot, in order to attain more promptly the general goal that you propose.

These habits and these ideas, which I will call revolutionary,u because all revolutions produce them, manifest themselves within aristocracies as well as among democratic peoples; but among the first they are often less powerful and always less durable, because there they encounter habits, ideas, flaws and failings that are contrary to them. So they fade away by themselves as soon as the revolution is finished, and the nation returns to its former political ways. It is not always so in democratic countries, where it is always to be feared that revolutionary instincts, becoming milder and more regular without dying out, will gradually turn into governmental mores and administrative habits.v

So I do not know of a country in which revolutions are more dangerous than democratic countries, because, apart from the accidental and passing evils that revolutions can never fail to produce, they always risk creating permanent and, so to speak, eternal ones.

I believe that there are honest acts of resistance and legitimate rebellions [v. revolutions]. So I am not saying, in an absolute way, that men of democratic times must never make revolutions; but I think that they are right to hesitate more than all the others before undertaking them, and that it is better for them to bear many of the inconveniences of the present state than to resort to such a perilous remedy.

I will conclude with a general idea that includes within it not only all the particular ideas that have been expressed in this present chapter, but also most of those that this book has the purpose of putting forth.

[What was above all to be feared formerly is no longer to be feared and new dangers have arisen that our fathers did not know.]w

In the centuries of aristocracy that preceded ours, there were very powerful individuals and a very feeble social authority. The very image of society was obscure and was constantly lost amid all the different powers that governed the citizens. The principal effort of the men of that time had to be to proceed to make the social power greater and to fortify it, to increase and to assure its prerogatives, and on the contrary, to restrict individual independence within more narrow limits, and to subordinate particular interest to the general interest.

Other dangers and other concerns await the men of today.

Among most modern nations, the sovereign power, whatever its origin, its constitution and its name, has become almost omnipotent, and individuals fall more and more into the final degree of weakness and dependency.

Everything was different in the old societies. Unity and uniformity were found nowhere. In our societies, everything threatens to become so similar, that the particular figure of each individual will soon be lost entirely in the common physiognomy. Our fathers were always ready to abuse this idea that particular rights are worthy of respect, and we are naturally led to exaggerate this other, that the interest of one individual must always yield before the interest of several.

The political world is changing; from now on we must seek new remedies for new evils.

To fix for the social power extensive, but visible and immobile limits; to give to individuals certain rights and to guarantee to them the uncontested enjoyment of these rights; to preserve for the individual the little of independence, of strength and of originality that remain to him; to raise him up beside society and sustain him in the face of it: such seems to me to be the first goal of the legislator in the age we are entering.x

It could be said that the sovereigns of today only seek to create great things with men. I would like them to think a bit more about creating great men, to attach less value to the work and more to the worker,y and to remember constantly that a nation cannot long remain strong when each man is individually weak, and that we have not yet found either social forms or political combinations that can create an energetic people by bringing together faint-hearted and soft citizens.z

I see among our contemporaries two opposite but equally fatal ideas.

Some see in equality only the anarchical tendencies that it engenders. They fear their free will; they are afraid of themselves.

The others, in smaller number, but better enlightened, have another view. Alongside the road that, starting at equality, leads to anarchy, they have finally found the path that seems to lead men invincibly toward servitude; they bend their soul in advance to this necessary servitude; and despairing of remaining free, they already adore at the bottom of their heart the master who must soon come.

The first abandon liberty because they consider it dangerous; the second because they judge it impossible.

If I had had this last belief, I would not have written the work that you have just read; I would have limited myself to bemoaning in secret the destiny of my fellow men.

I wanted to put forth in full light the risks that equality makes human independence run, because I believe firmly that these risks are the most formidable as well as the least foreseen of all those that the future holds.a But I do not believe them insurmountable.

The men who live in the democratic centuries that we are entering naturally have the taste for independence.b Naturally they bear rules with impatience: the permanence of even the state they prefer wearies them. They love power; but they are inclined to scorn and to hate the one who exercises it, and they easily escape from between his hands because of their smallness and their very mobility.

These instincts will always be found, because they emerge from the core of the social state which will not change. For a long time they will prevent any despotism from being able to become established, and they will provide new weapons to each new generation that wants to fight in favor of the liberty of men.

So let us have for the future this salutary fear that makes us vigilant and combative, and not this sort of soft and idle terror that weakens and enervates hearts.c

chapter 8a

General View of the Subjectb

Before leaving forever the course that I have just covered, I would like to be able to encompass with a last look all the various features that mark the face of the new world, and finally to judge the general influence that equality must exercise on the fate of men; but the difficulty of such an enterprise stops me; in the presence of such a great matter, I feel my sight fail and my reason falter.c

This new society, which I have sought to portray and which I want to judge, has only just been born. Time has not yet set its form; the great revolution that created it is still going on, and in what is happening today, it is nearly impossible to discern what must pass away with the revolution itself, and what must remain after it.

The world that is rising is still half caught in the ruins of the world that is falling, and amid the immense confusion presented by human affairs, no one can say which old institutions and ancient mores will remain standing and which will finally disappear.

Although the revolution that is taking place in the social state, the laws, the ideas, the sentiments of men, is still very far from being finished, already you cannot compare its works with anything that has been seen previously in the world. I go back century by century to the most distant antiquity; I notice nothing that resembles what is before our eyes. Since the past no longer clarifies the future, the mind moves in shadows.

But amid this picture so vast, so new, so confused, I already glimpse a few principal features which are becoming apparent and I point them out.

I see that the good and the bad are distributed equally enough in the world. Great wealth disappears; the number of small fortunes increases; desires and enjoyments multiply; there is no more extraordinary prosperity or irreversible poverty. Ambition is a universal sentiment; there are few vast ambitions. Each individual is isolated and weak; society is agile, far-sighted and strong; individuals do small things and the State immense ones.

Souls are not energetic; but mores are mild and legislation humane. If little great devotion, few very high, very brilliant, and very pure virtues are found, habits are steady, violence is rare and cruelty almost unknown. The lives of men become longer and their property more secure. Life is not very ornate, but very comfortable and very peaceful. There are few very delicate and very coarse pleasures, little courtesy in manners and little brutality in tastes. You scarcely find very learned men or very ignorant populations. Genius becomes rarer and enlightenment more common. The human mind is developed by the small combined efforts of all men, and not by the powerful impulse of a few of them. There is less perfection, but more fecundity in works. All the bonds of race, class, country are loosening; the great bond of humanity is tightening.d

If among all these various features, I seek the one that seems to me the most general and the most striking, I come to see that what is noticeable in fortunes reappears again in a thousand other forms. Nearly all the extremes become softer and are blunted; nearly all the salient points are worn away to make way for something middling, which is at the very same time less high and less low, less brilliant and less obscure than what was seen in the world.e

I run my eyes over this innumerable crowd composed of similar beings, in which nothing either rises or falls. The spectacle of this universal uniformity [and of this mediocrity] saddens me and chills me, and I am tempted to regret the society that is no more.

When the world was filled with very great and very small, very rich and very poor, very learned and very ignorant, [very fortunate and very miserable] men, I turned my eyes away from the second to fix them only on the first, and the latter delighted my sight. But I understand that this pleasure arose from my weakness; it is because I cannot see all that surrounds me at the same time that I am allowed to choose in this way and to separate, among so many objects, those that it pleases me to consider. It is not the same for the all-powerful and eternal Being, whose eyes necessarily take in the whole of things, and who sees all of humanity and each man distinctly, though at the same time.

It is natural to believe that what most satisfies the sight of this creator and preserver of men, is not the singular prosperity of a few, but the greatest well-being of all; so what seems to me decline, is in his eyes progress; what hurts me, agrees with him. Equality is perhaps less elevated; but it is more just, and its justice makes its grandeur and its beauty.

I try hard to enter into this point of view of God, and from there I seek to consider and to judge human things.f

No one, on the earth, can yet assert in an absolute and general way that the new state of societies is superior to the old state; but it is already easy to see that it is different.

There are certain vices and certain virtues that were attached to the constitution of aristocratic nations and that are so contrary to the genius of the new peoples that you cannot introduce those vices and virtues among them. There are good tendencies and bad instincts that were foreign to the first that are natural to the second; ideas that occur by themselves to the imagination of the first and that the mind of the second rejects. They are like two distinct humanities, each of which has its particular advantages and disadvantages, its good and its evil which are its own.g

So you must be very careful about judging the societies that are being born by the ideas that you have drawn from those that are no longer. That would be unjust, for these societies, differing prodigiously from each other, are not comparable.

It would be scarcely more reasonable to ask of the men [v. democratic peoples] of today the particular virtues that resulted from the social state of their ancestors, since this social state itself has fallen, and since in its fall it swept away in a confused way all the good and all the bad that it carried with it.

But these things are still poorly understood today. I notice a great number of my contemporaries who undertake to make a choice among the institutions, the opinions, the ideas that arose from the aristocratic constitution of the former society; they would willingly abandon some, but they would still like to retain others and carry them with them into the new world.

I think that those men use up their time and their strength in an honest and sterile work.

It is no longer a matter of retaining the particular advantages that inequality of conditions gains for men, but of assuring the new advantages that equality can offer them.h We must not aim to make ourselves similar to our fathers, but to work hard to attain the type of grandeur and happiness that is appropriate to us.

As for me, having reached the final end of my journey, I discern from afar, but all at once, all the various matters that I had contemplated separately while going along, and I feel full of fears and full of hopes.j I see great dangers that it is possible to avert, great evils that can be avoided or limited; and I become more and more confirmed in this belief that, to be honest and prosperous, it is still enough for democratic nations to want to be so.

I am not unaware that several of my contemporaries have thought that here below peoples are never masters of themselves, and that they obey necessarily I do not know what insurmountable and unintelligent force that arises from previous events, from race, from soil, or from climate.k

Those are false and cowardly doctrines that can produce only weak men and pusillanimous nations. Providence has created humanity neither entirely independent nor completely slave. It traces around each man, it is true, a fatal circle out of which he cannot go; but within its vast limits, man is powerful and free; so are peoples.m

The nations of today cannot make conditions among them not be equal; but it depends on them whether equality leads them to servitude or liberty, to enlightenment or barbarism, to prosperity or misery.n

[a. ] Plan of this part in a draft:

Plan of the chapter in the rubish:

This is found in a jacket placed with the rubish of the chapter on material well-being (chapter 10 of the second part). The jacket bears this commentary: “How equality of ranks suggests to men the taste for liberty and for equality. Why democratic peoples love equality better than liberty./

“Piece from which I will probably have to make the second section of the chapter and that must be carefully reexamined while reviewing this chapter. 4 September 1838” (Rubish, 1).

The drafts reproduced in notebook CVd bear this commentary at the head:

[b. ] In the manuscript: “Do only a single chapter from all of that beginning with the foreword (a) and then divided into sections.” This fourth part forms one single chapter in the manuscript and bears the number 60. The conclusion, which constitutes the last chapter, bears the number 61. Apart from the drafts of the chapter, there exist various drafts contained in jackets and bearing the following titles: unity, centralization, administrative despotism; notes of the chapter; relative to the idea of unity; ideas which i can hope to use; and thoughts to add on the influence exercised by democratic ideas on the forms of government.

In July 1838 (OCB, VII, pp. 167-68), Tocqueville writes to his brother,Édouard, that he is working on the last part of his book and that this is composed of two short chapters. At the end of the month of August, he notes that he has already finished the draft of the first version; on October 1 he begins to work on the last chapter. Writing the draft and revision will take an entire year, and the two initial chapters will be replaced by a total of eight chapters. The quantity of notes and drafts testifies to Tocqueville’s efforts to finish the part that he considered the most important of his work.

The manuscript and the drafts seem to indicate that the first chapter of this part was added at the end, and that the second and third chapters formed only one in the first drafts.

[a. ] In the manuscript: “. . . government based on the principle of sovereignty of the people.”

[b. ] What to do to combine the spirit of equality and the spirit of liberty and make liberty reign amid a leveled society.

This part is the most important for me./

The hydra of anarchy is the sacramental phrase of all the enemies of liberty. The cowardly, the corrupt, the servile try to outdo each other in repeating it. The weak and the honest say it also.

It is a monster that I must look in the face. For it is after all the great enemy of my ideas. What I want to bring along and to convince are honest souls. Well! The latter, at the point we have reached, are not afraid of despotism. They tremble before the hydra of anarchy. The fact is that there exists today a singular phenomenon for which we must account.

[To the side: It is honest men led by rogues who have always enslaved the world.

They do not see that in this way they are preparing habits, ideas, laws for all types of despotism, that of all or of one man. These men who today ask of power only to save them from anarchy resemble those drowning men who cling to a dead body and drag it away with them. By violent and reactionary laws, by the violation of existing laws, by the absence of laws, they destroy the ideas of the just and the unjust, of the permissible and the forbidden, of the legal and the illegal, and they thus open the door to all anarchical tyrannies. They are the pioneers of anarchy.]

Liberty and power gradually become weaker and each one in its own way. They are two exhausted and stiff old men who struggle with each other without either one winning, because their weaknesses, not their strengths, are equal; and grappling with each other, they roll together in the same dust.

Thus, those who say that liberty is weak are right. Those who maintain that power is weak are also right. What to conclude from that? Fix all the force of my mind on that.

[To the side: I believe, moreover, that the same symptoms presented themselves before the temporary or definitive enslavement of all peoples.]

To show that arbitrary and anti-liberal measures will not save us from the hydra of anarchy and to demonstrate that legal and liberal measures will not lead there, that is what we must above all work hard to do.

What modern nation (three illegible words) despotism, and how to break despotism without anarchy. Despotism is party to anarchy.

[To the side] What to think of the future of an unfortunate country in which there is an honest and pure man who says that he is not concerned about its posterity, but about himself; who says that country in the general sense is a word, that he very much wants the country to be and to remain free, provided that his fortune and his life remain sure, but that rather than putting these things in dogma [danger (ed.)], tyranny seems better to him; who says that he prefers a permanent, meddlesome, civilizing despotism to a temporary anarchy? And what to hope for his century when the other honest and pure men who surround the former approve his language? This is [illegible word] the sad spectacle that I had today, 7 February 1837 (YTC, CVd, pp. 16-18).

[c. ] “As for me, I consider this taste for natural independence as the most precious present that equality has given to men” (YTC, CVk, 2, pp. 45-46).

[a. ] Order of this section.

The theoretical and philosophical idea of government among democratic peoples is uniformity and centralization.

[To the side: That democratic peoples imagine liberty only in the form of a great assembly of representatives with strong and regulative executive power.]

Diverse instincts which lead democratic peoples to love centralization of power.

1. Difficulty of knowing to whom to deliver provincial administration.

2. The noble having disappeared, incapacity of local [v: new] men, ignorance, above all at the beginning.

3. Envy of the neighbor. Sentiments above all visible when aristocracy has long reigned in a country

4. That a despot in embryo must loudly profess these doctrines, favor and approve interests.

≠5. Establish only a sole representative assembly, a strong and regulative executive power.≠

5. Establish only national representation, next to it an executive power which would be more or less subject to it, but which would be strong, inquisitorial,regulative.

[To the side: Among democratic peoples, it is not impossible that a government is centralizing and popular at the same time, and it can go so far as calling itself centralizing and liberal, and it is not impossible that it is believed.]

6. Individualism, material enjoyments (YTC, CVd, pp. 31-32).

[b. ] Titles on the jacket that contains the manuscript: “what ideas men naturally conceive in the matter of government in centuries of equality./

“how the ideas that naturally present themselves to men in centuries of equality lead them to concentrate all powers.”

[c. ] To the side: “Be careful that this does not too much resemble the opening regardinghonor.”

[d. ] Note to the side of a first version: “Perhaps all these ideas, which seem to me clear and even too evident, will seem too metaphysical, and perhaps it will be necessary to put them within the reach of the ordinary reader by more detailed explanations?” (Rubish, 2).

[e. ]“To show better also how in the United States the state breaks individuals and even organized groups of men [corps ] with a prodigious ease, since the idea of individualrights there is weaker and more obscure than in England.” Jacket, thoughts to add on the influence exercised by democratic ideas on the forms of government (Rubish, 2).

[f. ] A note in the manuscript: “Can introduce piece (a) there.”

This piece (a) specifies: “<A unique and central government [v: power] charged with dispensing the same laws to the entire State and with regulating in the same way each one of those who inhabit it, an intelligent, far-sighted and strong administration that enlightens, aids, constantly directs individuals, such is the ideal that in democratic times will always occur by itself to the imagination of men as soon as they come to think about government.>”

[Translator’s Note 8:] In this paragraph and in the next one, and in note e for p. 1196 and note a for p. 1206, the translator has repeated the pattern followed in the first volume. Where Tocqueville seems clearly to be referring to the American states, the translator has dropped the uppercase for state. Elsewhere, the uppercase is retained: State.

[g. ] In the margin: “<These opinions have not been borrowed by the Americans from their fathers the English, for at the period of the establishment of the colonies, the English, no more than other Europeans, had not yet conceived of such opinions. Still today they have adopted them only in part. They introduce them only in our times, but with difficulty and as conditions become less different and men more similar.>”

[h. ] In the margin: “<The problem with all this is that it seems to me to anticipate section IV, which I will be able to judge only when I am there. If so, it would be necessary to stop at the end of page 2 and make this chapter the head of the following chapter which would then be titled: How the ideas and the sentiments . . .>” Page 2 of the manuscript ends at the paragraph that begins thus: “If you really want to examine . . .”

[j. ] On a loose sheet in the manuscript:

[k. ] See note b of p. 727.

[n. ] In the margin: “≠This sentence excludes the preceding one. Either the one or the other must be removed.≠”

[o. ] Note in the margin in a first version: “Perhaps here all the ultra-unitary extravagances, Saint-Simonianism . . .” (Rubish, 2).

[a. ] The idea of all this chapter is simple.

Equality gives birth to two tendencies:

• 1. One which takes men to liberty.
• 2. The other which distances men from liberty and leads them to servitude.

Liberty and servitude coming from equality. There is the idea of the chapter.

Equality comes only as source of liberty and of servitude./

Now.

To know what makes men love equality more than liberty; it is a closely connected, but very distinct idea; for men could prefer equality to liberty, without equality being what pushed them toward servitude.

The comparison of the love of equality and the love of liberty is worth being made. But here it hinders the natural movement of the mind./

Make it a separate chapter which I will introduce afterward where I can (Rubish, 2).

It is possible that certain ideas on centralization set forth in this chapter and the following had their origin in the observations made by Tocqueville in England. In 1835, particularly, Tocqueville believed he had found in England a tendency toward centralization that he thought likely for the ensemble of democracies. The Poor Law and conversations with Mill and Reeve seem to have in part confirmed his theory for him (Voyage en Angleterre, OC, V, 2, pp. 22, 26, 49, and 53); also see Seymour Drescher, Tocqueville and England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964).

On 8 July 1838, when he began this last part, Tocqueville asked Beaumont for examples about centralization. Beaumont’s answer is lost (Correspondance avec Beaumont, OC,VIII, 1, pp. 311-12).

[b. ] “≠I see clearly how the fear of revolutions leads men to give great prerogatives to power in general, but not how it leads them to centralize power.≠”(Rubish, 2).

[c. ]7 March 1838. Unity, centralization.

However animated you are against unity and the governmental unity that is called centralization, you cannot nonetheless deny that unity and centralization are the most powerful means to do quickly, energetically, and in a given place, very great things.

That reveals one of the reasons why in democratic centuries centralization and unity are loved so much. The character of these centuries is love of rapid and easy enjoyments and indifference about the future. In the eyes of all the public men of those times, centralization is the means of attaining quickly and without difficulty the results that they desire.

Thus equality gives birth to the idea of unity and the same equality suggests the taste for it (Rubish, 2).

[1. ]In democratic societies, only the central power has some stability in its position and some permanence in its enterprises. All the citizens are stirring constantly and becoming transformed. Now, it is in the nature of every government to want gradually to enlarge its sphere. So it is very difficult that in the long run the latter does not manage to succeed, since it acts with a fixed thought and a continuous will on men whose position, ideas and desires vary every day.

Often it happens that the citizens work for it without wanting to do so.

Democratic centuries are times of experiments, of innovation and of adventures. A multitude of men is always engaged in a difficult or new enterprise that they are pursuingseparately without being burdened by their fellows. The former very much accept, as a general principle, that the public power must not intervene in private affairs, but, by exception, each one of them desires that it helps him in the special matter that preoccupies him and seeks to draw the action of the government in his direction, all the while wanting to restrain it in all others.

Since a multitude of men has this particular view at the same time on a host of different matters, the sphere of the central power expands imperceptibly in all directions, even though each one of them wishes to limit it. So a democratic government increases its attributions by the sole fact that it lasts. Time works for it; it profits from all accidents; individual passions help it even without their knowing, and you can say that a democratic government becomes that much more centralized the older the democratic society is.

[d. ] This proposition that hatred of inequality is that much greater as inequality is less is well proved by what happened among aristocratic peoples themselves within the interior of each class. The nobles were not jealous of the king, but of those among them who rose above the others, and they called loudly for equality. As long as the bourgeois were different from the nobles, they were not jealous of the nobles, but of each other; and if we get down to the bottom of our heart, won’t we all be appalled to see that envy makes itself felt there above all in regard to our neighbors, our friends and our near relations? You are not jealous of those people because they are neighbors, friends and relations, but because they are our fellows and our equals.

The hatred of inequality in proportion as inequality is less is therefore a truth in all times and applicable to all men (new ideas relative to democratic sentiments that favor centralization,Rubish, 2).

[e. ] In the margin: “≠Perhaps keep this for the place where I will speak about liberalinstincts created by equality.≠”

[f. ] “Pantheism.

“Saint-Simonianism.” (In the Rubishrelative to the idea of unity in general,Rubish, 2.)

“Saint-Simonian theory and other democratic theories. Pantheism. Agreement of the governmental and radical press on this point.” (In the jacket that bears the title: “unity, centralization, administrative despotism./

“Mixture of administrative and judicial power./

“23 March 1838” Rubish, 2.)

[a. ] Appendix of section.—Section IV./

Ideas of the chapter.

1.When liberty has existed before equality, it establishes habits that are opposed to the excessive development of the central power.

2.When equality has developed rapidly with the aid of a revolution, the taste for intermediary powers disappears more quickly. Centralization becomes necessary in a way.

3. Revolution makes hatred and jealousy of the neighbor more intense and leads either the upper or the lower classes to want to centralize.

4. Enlightenment and ignorance.

5. War.

6. Disorder.

7. Democratic nature of the central power.

[In the margin: New ideas.

1. Extraordinary talents.

2. Two ideas relative to revolutions and which have not been treated there.

3. When a people has been formed from several peoples, like the Americans.

≠4. When democratic society is ancient, the permanent ambition of the g[overnment (ed.)] gives it the advantage in the long run, because of the shifting desires of the citizens and of the multitude of (illegible word) into which they are constantly throwing themselves.≠]

The entire vice of this chapter seems to me to reside in this:

• 1. Definitively, the greatest number and the principal ones of the particular reasons that I give are connected with the particular accident of a revolution. So it would be necessary to put them separately and to announce in advance that I am going to deal with this order of particular causes. It is worth the trouble.
• 2. It would be necessary to put those causes in a better order so that the mind would pass better from one to the other.

It is on these two points that I must make a final effort while reviewing one last time.

6 November 1839 (YTC, CVk, 1, pp. 74-76).

On a page of drafts:

If I do not make the reader see America clearly, he will perhaps be invincibly opposed to my ideas, because seen in a haze and considered roughly, America seems in fact to provide an opposite argument.

Reflect on all that while reviewing (Rubish, 2).

[c. ] “In our time a famous sect has appeared that claimed to centralize all the forces of society in the same hands.

“[Further along, on the same page] If someone had spoken to me about the doctrines of the Saint-Simonians without letting me know the time or the country that saw them arise, I dare to affirm that I would have said without fear that they had been born in a democratic century [v: country]” (notes of the chapter,Rubish, 2).

[d. ] Financial centralization, and that one includes all the others, was established in France by the Convention, 5 September 1794, on a report of Cambon who, applying to finances the great principle of the unity and of the indivisibility of France, declared that in the future there would be only one budget, as there was only one State.

The excess of this principle forced it to be abandoned in the year IV and forced departmental budgets to be done.

But since then we have not ceased and still do not cease to remove sums from these budgets in order to carry them over to the budget of the State, that is to say that little by little we return more and more to the financial system created abruptly by the Convention. We see, adds the Journal des débats, which provided me with these details (6 March 1838) that the movement of administrative centralization continues, since the budget of the State swells and the departmental budget decreases (YTC, CVk, 2, p. 42).

Tocqueville is referring here to discussions on the law on departmental attributions that had taken place in the Chamber of Deputies in the month of March 1838. The details cited belong to the session of 6 March, reproduced in the Journal des débats the next day.

[e. ] In the margin: “≠This sentence is too much because here it is only a matter of administrative centralization.≠”

[f. ] .-.-.- In France, Napoleon was in the matter .-.-[of (ed.)].-.- centralization the accident, but the real and permanent cause was this sudden destruction of the upper {administrative} classes.

Those whose education, wealth, habits and memories naturally enabled them to conduct provincial affairs disappear; and with the confused mass that remained, still not having either enlightenment, or organization, or mores which could allow it to direct these same affairs, to whom would this same concern necessarily revert, if not to the central power? So centralization has been a necessary fact. That is true; the error is to say that it must be an eternal fact.

[To the side] I put a child under my guardianship; is this to say that I must keep him under my rule at manhood? (unity, centralization, administrative despotism,Rubish, 2).

[g. ] The two great disadvantages of centralization are these: 1. In the long run it prevents more undertakings and improvements than it can produce. 2. It delivers all of the social existence to a power that, becoming indolent or tyrannical, can end by plunging the nation into impotence or servitude.

These two dangers are distant and .-.-.-.- disclose even .-.-.-.-

The good that centralization produces, the order, the regularity, the uniformity so adored by democratic peoples, are, on the contrary, noticed and appreciated right away by these same minds.

How would its cause not be popular? (thoughts to add on the influence exercised by democratic ideas on the forms of government,Rubish, 2).

[h. ] This fragment constitutes an independent sheet of the manuscript. Tocqueville’s indications allow us to think that it would have been placed here.

[j. ] “When you examine all the laws that .-.-.- in England for the past fifty years and above all during recent years, you will see that all more or less have a tendency toward centralization and uniformity. That is enough for me to conclude that the great democratic revolution that today shapes the world is proceeding constantly among the English people, in spite of the obstacles that oppose it and despite the wealth and the men that the aristocracy still possesses there” (relative to the idea of unity in general,Rubish, 2).

[k. ] On this point the Americans, whatever their errors and their faults, deserve to be praised. They have well earned humanity’s gratitude. They have shown that the democratic social state and democratic laws did not have as a necessary result the degeneration of the human race.

I am very content to have found this idea because I believe it correct and because it is the only way to make America appear a final time in my last chapters, which really relate only to France.

[To the side] In America the State is a great deal, but the individual is something. Less than in England, but more than in France. He has rights, a strength of individuality less respected than among the English, more than among us (unity, centralization, administrative despotism,Rubish, 2).

[m. ] Centralization./

There are two types of decentralization.

One that is in a way instinctive, blind, full of prejudices, devoid of rules, that is born from the desire of small localities to be independent.

There is another one that is reasoned, enlightened, that knows its limits.

These two decentralizations are at the two ends of civilization. In the middle is a central power [that is] energetic, intelligent, that claims [doubtful reading (ed.)] to be able to do everything by itself and that manages, after a fashion, to do so.

Baden, 14 August 1836 (unity, centralization, administrative despotism,Rubish, 2).

[n. ] On accidental causes./

After the place where I show the government as the necessary heir to the old powers when they are suddenly destroyed.

Every time that a great revolution agitates a people, it gives birth within it to a host of new relationships, interests and needs, and you feel on all sides the need for a power that comes to regulate these relationships, guarantee these interests, satisfy these needs. That gives great opportunities to the government that this revolution has established to expand the circle of its action well beyond the old limits and to create a multitude of new attributions that none of the abolished powers had had. That is that much easier for the government because, amid this renewal of all things, the citizens are full of uncertainty, ignorance and fear, not seeing clearly enough.

So when equality is established with the help of and amid a great revolution it happens that the government immediately (two illegible words) its prerogatives not only because of equality of conditions, but also because of the revolution (which makes conditions equal) (YTC, CVj, 2, p. 13).

Page 14 of this same notebook contains an identical fragment.

After this passage, you read:

[o. ] “Unity. Centralization./

“Supply myself with an article on Egypt published in the Revue des deux mondes of 1 March 1838 and in which someone admires greatly that the Pasha has made himself the proprietor and the unique industrialist of his country, and in which it is implied that something approaching this or analogous could perhaps be tried in France.”

“Symptoms of the time” (unity, centralization, administrative despotism,Rubish, 2).

“.-.-.- centralization of the Pasha of Egypt which proves that when conditions are once equal, the idea of a central and uniform government presents itself as well in a period of incomplete civilization as in one of advanced civilization. I do not even know if centralization is not rather an idea of medium civilization than of very advanced civilization” (ideas to add on the influence exercised by democratic ideas on the forms of government,Rubish, 2).

[p. ] That among democratic nations, above all those that are not commercial, the State must be involved in more enterprises than in others./

Nuance to observe in that. If the State itself takes charge of everything, it finishes by throwing individuals into nothingness. If it takes charge of nothing, it is to be feared that it will not be able to emerge from it. Nuances very delicate, difficult to grasp. Position that is very easy to abuse. English system of not getting involved in anything. Aristocratic system. Liberty gives the desire and the idea of doing great things, and individuals powerful enough to do them easily by associating. American system in which the State encourages and does not share in the activities of enterprises, loans money, grants land, does nothing by itself (with the drafts of chapter 5 of the second part, on association in civil life, Rubish, 1).

[q. ]Superior men who all want to centralize. Accidental cause, the more democracies encounter such men, the more centralized they will become.

All the extraordinary men.

All the extraordinary talents go in this direction. Extraordinary talents in other times are often a cause of restlessness for the people among whom they are found. They create wars, divisions, violence, tyranny. But beyond that, in democracies, they always create centralization, because centralization is an admirable means of action that is clearly conceived and easily obtained only at that time.

I will say as much about all the extraordinary men who come to be born from time to time among these peoples.

All will love centralization and will seek to expand it, and it will be that much greater as they appear in greater number (YTC, CVk, 1, pp. 76-77).

[r. ] [In the margin: Ease of succeeding when the power does not give rise to fear about equality./

January 1837.]

What must be done in order to take hold of despotic power among democratic peoples and in the centuries of democratic transition. Ease of turning democratic passions against their goal, to cause liberty to be sacrificed to the blind love of equality and to the revolutionary passions that it brings about. To place somewhere toward the end of the volume and perhaps at the end after war (YTC, CVk, 2, p. 56).

[s. ] Variant in the manuscript: “. . . will always be more easy, more rapid and greater among democratic nations that live as a republic than among those that obey a monarch, and under new dynasties than under the old, and it will never meet fewer obstacles than under princes who have emerged from a low position, self-made men, who by their origin, their prejudices, their interests and their habits seem intimately tied to the cause of equality. You can say in a general way that in democratic societies centralization will always be that much greater as the sovereign is less aristocratic.”

[t. ] That, before everything, in order for a power to be able to arrive at tyranny among a democratic people, it must have come from the people and must at every occasion flatter the sentiment of equality.

Centralization. Individualism. Material enjoyment./

What precedes opens the way for me.

I want to find out by what condition despotism could establish itself among a democratic people and show how it could use the ideas and the sentiments that arise from equality. To struggle at the same time against the spirit of equality and the spirit of liberty would be folly, but they can be divided. Thus the great problem that the despots of our time and those of the centuries to come will have to have daily in view [interrupted text (ed.)].

From now on, those who will want to create absolute power by aristocracy or aristocracy by absolute power will be great fools, you can affirm it from today.

So what is necessary first for a power [v: government], so that it is possible for it to aspire to tyranny in a longer or shorter time?

I am not afraid to say it, a popular [v: plebeian] origin. It must, by its prejudices, its instincts, its memories, its interests, be intensely favorable to equality. Those are the primary qualities, without which, skill and even genius would be of no use to it to succeed, and with which, vices would be enough.

If it happened that this same man had a bold, brilliant, fertile mind, that he was without restraint in his passions as without limits in his desires, and that he himself naturally shared the democratic inclinations and vices, faults, opinions, which he wanted to use, I do not doubt that he would soon make himself formidable to liberty, and I do not know what the limits of his fortune would be if he added to all of these advantages that of being a bastard [v: if he joined to all of these advantages that of coming from the ranks of the people, his success would be even more probable].

[To the side: Debatable theorem.]

The first concern and the principal affair (of a government or of a man who aims for tyranny) must be to interest the dominant passion of the century in his favor. He can be wasteful, arbitrary, even cruel; it is not sure that he (illegible word) as long as he is not assumed to be aristocratic. But were he the opposite of all these things, he will assuredly perish if it is half-suspected that he is aristocratic. It is possible that in this, favorable circumstances serve him.

If by chance there exists within a democratic people a party, a class, or even a man who in the eyes of the public represents the principle of the inequality of conditions, that is a fortunate accident from which a government that aims for omnipotence must hasten to profit. Let it first exercise its emerging strength on the former; let it do against them its apprenticeship for tyranny. It can attempt it without danger. Two great results gained from the same blow. On the one hand, it proves in this way its hatred for aristocracy; {on the other} it accustoms the people to illegality and familiarizes them with arbitrariness and violence. How to suspect a power that emerges from our ranks, that represents us to ourselves, that acts for us and in our name, in the matter that is most in our hearts; that loves what we love, hates what we hate and strikes what we cannot reach? Won’t there be time to take precautions when it tries finally to turn against us the weapon that has been entrusted to it? The nation closes its eyes to that and falls asleep.

[With a bracket that includes the last two paragraphs: To delete.]

This reveals the type of utility that a democratic people can draw from ancient dynasties. When an ancient family of kings directs an aristocracy . . . (YTC, CVd, pp. 32-36); you find a draft of this fragment in YTC, CVd, pp. 37-41).

[u. ] The manuscript proposes two other conclusions:

In another place:

[a. ] Title in the drafts: that centralization is the greatest danger for the democratic nations of europe (Rubish, 2).

[b. ] The manuscript says: “I am far from censuring . . .”

[c. ] “The greatest originality of my chapter is in this idea, still a bit confused, that showstwo revolutions operating almost in opposite directions. The one that tends to give to the central power a new origin, new tastes, to detach it from aristocracy....

“And the other that constantly increases its prerogatives” (Rubish, 2).

[e. ] The manuscript says: “all religions tend to become national.”

[f. ] “Ultra-unitary movement of the clergy. Symptoms of the time. Reread Lacordaire./

“Intellectual centralization. Idea of unity which pushed man as far as the last refuges of individual originality” (notes of the chapter,Rubish, 2).

[2. ]As the attributions of the central power augment, the number of officials who represent it increases. They form a nation within each nation and, since the government lends them its stability, they more and more replace the aristocracy among each nation.

Nearly everywhere in Europe, the sovereign [power] dominates in two ways: it leads one part of the citizens by the fear that they feel for its agents, and the other by the hope that they conceive of becoming those agents.

[g. ] Nothing can delight the imagination of an ambitious man more than the image of a unique power that, with a word, can put an entire people on alert and move it from one place to another. That seems admirable above all in times like ours when we are so impatient to enjoy, and when we want to gain great enjoyments only by means of small efforts.

[To the side: Perhaps move to accidental causes.]

You can predict that nearly all the ambitious and capable minds that a democratic country contains will apply themselves without let-up to expanding the attributions of the social power, because all hope to direct it one day. It is a waste of time to want to demonstrate to those men [that (ed.)] extreme centralization <agglomeration> of powers can harm the State, since they centralize for themselves.

In democratic countries, you find only very honest or very mediocre men who occupy themselves with setting some limits for the central power. The first are rare and the second can do nothing.

In democratic countries, the people are led not only by their tastes to concentrate power, but also by the passions of all the citizens.

[To the side] Perhaps move to accidental causes (Rubish, 2). See p. 1293.

[h. ] When men all depend more or less on each other, it is enough for the government to lead the principal ones among them in order for the rest to follow.

But when they are all equal and independent, society must in a way be occupied separately with each citizen and guide him.

So it is natural and necessary that the attributions of the government be more numerous and more detailed in a democratic country than in an aristocratic country (ideas that i can hope to use,Rubish, 2).

You find also in a copy of the drafts these two pieces on the same subject:

Centralization./

Centralization is that much more absurd as the government is more truly representative. When the minister is occupied for six months with attacking and defending himself in the chambers, how can he have the time to direct all the provincial interests with which he is charged? The care [illegible word] the responsibility for it comes necessarily to a clerk. Now, what superior guarantee is offered by the wisdom of a clerk compared to that of local magistrates?

4 April 1837 (YTC, CVd, p. 31).

[j. ] Tocqueville seems to refer to the well-known passage of chapter VII of the first book of Contrat social. Rousseau, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Pléiade, 1964), III, p. 364.

[k. ] A centralized administration, but slow and fond of red tape and paperwork./

.-.-.- in the session of 2 .-.- March 1838 after praising the administration of m[ines (ed.)] .-.- at the top of his voice, he complained however that its members do not visit, as they ought to do, all the mines that are subject to their inspection and are crushed under all the red tape and paperwork. As if a centralized administrationcould ever completely meet its program, and as if it was not by its essence fond of red tape and paperwork. This last thing above all follows very closely.

From the moment when everything comes from a center, the director of the machine, who can see nothing by himself, but who must know everything, needs to have innumerable accounts sent to him, to sheck [check (ed.)] one employee by another. In a great centralized administration a hierarchy is needed, that is to say a .-.-.-.- of order and correspondence. Those are the needs. The passions are still much more fond of red tape and paperwork. The permanent inclination of the minister is to want to do everything and to know everything and to order everything, which necessitates still much more correspondence than need does.

And the offices that rule the minister have an interest in drawing everythingtoward him, which is to say toward them. They have the same passions as the minister does, and they never have, as he does, the political and general point of view that can curb these passions.

So a centralized administration is by its nature slow and fond of writing. It can have great advantages, but this disadvantage is certain./

The obligation of dealing with all affairs without seeing each other necessitatesinfinite paperwork./

Édouard told me something correct: that fondness for red tape and paperwork was that much greater as the affair was smaller. A great affair is dealt with in Paris. People see each other, come to an understanding, become interested. But in order to understand why a commune wants to sell six feet of land, infinite paperwork is required, for people cannot see each other and no one takes an interest (unity, centralization, administrative despotism,Rubish, 2).

Tocqueville is referring to the discussion on the administration of mines which had taken place in the Chamber in March 1838 (see the Journal des débats of 21 March 1838). After the floods of the mines of Rive-de-Gier, the government had presented to the Chamber a proposed law in which it required, under penalty of expropriation, the execution of certain measures on the part of the owners of mines in case of danger. The deputies opposed to the proposed law defended the liberty of the owner by relying on article 7 of the law of 21 April 1810, which considered mines as a common property whose conveying and expropriation fell into the domain of the ordinary principles of civil law. See, further on, Tocqueville’s note 5.

[m. ] In 1837, Tocqueville had asked Beaumont to bring back to him from England all types of brochures and information on the Scottish savings banks, destined for the drafting of the second part of his Mémoire sur le paupérisme. The information gathered by Beaumont confirmed Tocqueville in his fear of a state centralization as regards savings (Correspondance avec Beaumont, OC, VIII, 1, pp. 185, 191, 193, and 196).

[3. ]On the one hand, the taste for well-being augments constantly, and the government takes hold more and more of all the sources of well-being.

So men go by two diverse paths toward servitude. The taste for well-being turns them away from getting involved in the government, and the love of well-being makes them more and more narrowly dependent on those who govern.

[n. ] “Opinion of Michel de Bourges (23 March 1838) to ponder: I seem here to want to strengthen beyond measure the principle of property which according to my political principles is always defended strongly enough. That leads to reflection because it seems that all the men of today, whatever their origin and point of departure, royalists and republicans, democrats or fiery enemies of democracy, unite in the principle of unity, and from there run in common toward servitude” (unity, centralization, administrative despotism,Rubish, 2). It probably concerns an extract from the debate on mines to which note 5 of p. 1234 refers.

[o. ] This theory, so vaunted, so accepted today, and now self-sustaining [word fragment], of the exact division of judicial and administrative powers must be examined once and for all, head on and very closely. This theory is spoken about only with respect; it is the holy ark. Let us pierce this covering; let us dare to discuss what is believed as a religion; let us see the naked truth and face to face.

That it is true in a general way that judicial and administrative powers must be distinct is incontestable.

But is it important for the salvation of the State and for good administration that the judicial system and the executive power are never combined in the same acts? That is what I do not believe. You start from a good principle, but you push it to the absurd. The intervention of the judicial power in the acts of the administrativepower seems to me often useful and sometimes so necessary that I do not imagine liberty possible without that.

Perhaps this question must be gone into more deeply by me here, but beyond that, it merits a particular, detailed, practical examination on my part for France. This must be for me one of the first works after this book. For I believe that the principal hazard for the future is there. It is incontestable that the administrative power is inevitablycalled to play a more important and more multifarious role in the centuries which begin than previously.

[In the margin: the Conseil d’É_tat is something, but not enough, and it would be nothing without liberty of the press.]

The entire question is to know if you can combine the guarantees of liberty with the necessary action of administrative power.

You cannot stop the development of this power, but you can give it some counterbalances/ (unity, centralization, administrative despotism,Rubish, 2).

[p. ] Two tendencies to distinguish:

In another jacket:

[q. ] The manuscript says: “. . . but not justice itself.”

[4. ]On this subject in France there is a strange sophism. When a trial between the administration and an individual arises, we refuse to submit its examination to an ordinary judge, in order it is said, not to mix administrative power and judicial power. As if it were not mixing these two powers and mixing them in the most dangerous and most tyrannical fashion to clothe the government with the right to judge and to administer at the same time.

[r. ]1. General reasons that cause the progress of industry to make the central power progress:

• 1. Nature of the property and of the industrial class that most naturally occupies the government.
• 2. Creation of new goods and persons.

2. Particular and European reasons:

• 1.

  Ancient prejudice against the property and the class.

  Facts that support these arguments (Rubish, 2).

[s. ] “Perhaps be infinitely more rapid in this piece. Tell the facts without explaining them. They are present to the readers because they are French facts” (Rubish, 2).

[t. ] In the margin: “<All this applies only to indirect taxes, and indirect taxes do not strike only industrial products. The thought is therefore obscure and partly false.>”

[u. ] “As industry develops you see growing with it a class of men who live only on the salary of every day and who can only find in the accumulation of salary the means to conquer their independence and to change their lot little by little. This class has always existed in the world, but its development is new. It is already numerous; it threatens to become innumerable” (Rubish, 2).

[v. ] “I believe that industrialist must be understood as every man who gains money by the aid of a mechanical art, such as iron worker, carpenter, and finally manufacturer.

“I do not believe that merchants, who only buy and sell, can be put in the number of industrialists.

“[To the side: What do I mean by industrial property?

“You see clearly what an industrialist is, but what is an industrial property?]

“Farmers are certainly not there and, with more reason, tenant farmers” (Rubish, 2).

[w. ] In the margin: “<The democratic class par excellence.>”

[x. ] “<To govern the men of our times, new vices and new virtues are needed>” (Rubish, 2).

And in another place: “Ideas to keep, to treat, but I do not know where and how to make them enter into my classifications./

“What astonishes me in man is not so much the weakness that he exhibits against a multitude of natural enemies, as the manner in which he obeys a kind of invisible power that hides in himself.”

[In the margin:

[z. ] “Double movement:

“The government draws closer to industry and takes hold of the smallest industrialists.

“Private industry becomes bigger and enters into the sphere of power./

“And the government descends into the sphere of private industry” (Rubish, 2).

[a. ]“Equality is the great fact of our time.

“Industrial development the second.

“Both augment the power of the government, or rather both are only one” (Rubish, 2).

[b. ] Yesterday (26 February 1836) I met M. Polonceau. I had a very interesting conversation with him.

He spent twenty years in the administration of bridges and roads, was chief engineer there, and has more or less retired since that time. He is an active, innovative, perhaps imprudent spirit, which the esprit de corps could not tame. He perhaps speaks with animosity about the administration of which he was part, but he says very interesting and, I believe, generally very true things, about the taste of this administration for established things, principally established by it, about its efforts to impede everything that does not come from it, about its determination not to adopt fixed rules that would limit it, about its interminable delays, its expensive habits, its preferences, its little taste for publicity.

He told me that to know its organization and to appreciate its spirit I must study:

• 1. The decree of organization given in 1811.
• 2. The collection of annual reports on bridges and roads (YTC, CVa, pp. 57-58).

[c. ] In the manuscript:

[d. ] What happened at the end of the 1837 session for railroads, and the way in which nearly everyone fell into agreement that the government must take charge of everything, is characteristic and shows clearly the slope that carries us, friends and enemies of liberty, toward the centralization of all powers in the hands of the government and the introduction of its hand into all affairs.

Those men are very foolish to believe that while giving a government immensecivil attributions, they will easily put fetters on it in the field of politics, and to think that a man {charged} with handling by himself alone all the financial resources of a great people, with putting millions of workers into motion, with executing works of all types upon which national prosperity and life are based, will not be master of all the rest when he wants to be.

This 30 June 1837.

The language of the newspaper the Siècle has for a month been characteristic because this newspaper is conspicuously in the hands of Odilon Barrot and of the liberal and democratic opposition of the left.

If it is a matter of public works in general, it wants the government to take charge of them alone, to dragoon masses of workers, to bring them sometimes from one side, sometimes from another.

As for the railroads in particular, the government must above all take charge of them, for such an undertaking would give too much power to individuals and would grant them immense privileges. Moreover, it would be necessary to grant different concessions, so that the great French unity and uniformity would not be altered.

There is nothing, including the mines, that, according to the Siècle (27 June 1837), the government must not exploit. Why, it says, would the State not claim the exploitation of the underground domain, instead of conceding it freely to the privileged?

Do you see how democratic passions adapt here marvelously well to the increases of central power and how democratic instincts and prejudices go complacentlybefore tyranny provided that unity and equality are sheltered?/

I cannot prevent myself from admiring the simplicity of those who believe that you can without disadvantage increase the civil rights of the government provided that you do not increase its political power, as if . . . [interrupted text (ed.)](Fragment on writing paper, unity, centralization, administrative despotism,Rubish, 2).

In the same jacket you also find these explanations:

[e. ] In the margin: “<≠These two facts are closely related to each other, for it is enough to enlighten equal men for them to tend all by themselves toward industry.≠>”

[f. ] To the side: “<This said above. Is it better there?>”

[g. ] It concentrates in its hand great public functions that were wrongly separated from it, such as the preparation of all types of general laws,

customs,

the collection of taxes,

the central direction of the judicial system,

the army, the police,

the direction of great local affairs that by their greatness have a general interest,

the supervision of all [interrupted text (ed.)] (Rubish, 2).

[h. ] ≠To uphold the individual in the face of the social power whatever it is, to preserve for him something of his independence, of his strength, of his originality, such must be the continual effort of all the friends of humanity in democratic centuries. Just as in democratic [aristocratic (ed.)] centuries, it was necessary to magnify society and to reduce the individual.

Were I alone in saying that, I would not remain silent.≠

[To the side: This must go in the peroration of section V.

Question of dynasty, secondary question.]

Centralization must grow constantly because it results from instincts that do not change. Men succeed each other in power; their passions, their interests, their ideas vary; but all, either voluntarily or involuntarily, centralize, because by centralizing, they obey, without knowing it, an instinct that is immobile. Amid the singular mobility of their thoughts and of their existence, it is the only permanent and durable thing that is in power today.

[In the margin] 27 February 1838 (YTC, CVk, 2, pp. 41-42).

[a. ] What the character of military despotism would be if it came to be established among a democratic people.

Idea to treat either at military spirit or at administrative despotism. Probably at the first. To blend into a chapter rather than to treat separately.

I see two places for this.

1. The first is after what I said about the turbulent spirit of the army, about its habitual discontent, about the place that it occupies in society. I could show these sentiments leading the army to seize the government. I would then say in what spirit it would govern.

2. Here is the second place: after painting administrative despotism, I could ask myself if it would not be changed for the worse by its combination with military government (something possible). I would prove that things would hardly be worse. I would then pass to the combination of this same despotism with sovereignty of the people and I would prove that things would hardly be better.

3. Finally couldn’t I place this idea separately (illegible word)? (YTC, CVj, 2, pp. 9-10).

[b. ]“Despotism, tyrannical, arbitrary and absolute government of only one man (or of only one power must be added).

“The principle of despotic States is that only one man governs there entirely according to his will, having absolutely no other laws than that of his caprices. Encyclopédie.This was written before we had seen the despotism of an assembly under the Republic.”

In another place in the rubish: “This word despotism is unfortunate because its old meaning does not exactly correspond to the new meaning that I want to give it” (Rubish,2).

[c. ] To the side: “<Perhaps place this here:

“Those, I said, who think to rediscover the monarchy of H[enri (ed.)]. IV or L[ouis (ed.)]. XIV seem very blind to me. As for me, when I consider the state which several European nations have already reached and toward which all the others are tending, I feel myself led to believe that among them there will soon no longer be a place except for democratic liberty or for the tyranny of the Caesars.>” Tocqueville cites here p. 511 of the second volume.

[d. ] 7 March 1838.

I said in the first part of this book that the new societies could well finally arrive at something similar to what we saw at the fall of the Roman empire. There is no longer any middle ground, I said, between the government of all and the tyranny of the Caesars.

Four years of new meditations made me consider the same matter from another point of view and convinced me that if men are enslaved, they will be so in an entirely new fashion and will exhibit a spectacle for which the past has not prepared us.

There was something of the great, of the colossal in the Roman tyranny, of the aristocratic, the magnificent, of the master of slaves, of the barbaric, of the pagan. All things that cannot habitually be found in a civilized and democratic society.

New society, regular, peaceful, ruled with art and uniformity, mixture of college, seminary, regiment, asleep rather than chained in the arms of clerks and soldiers, bureaucratic tyranny, fond of red tape, very repressive of all impulse, destroying the will for great things in germ, but mild and regular, equal for all. A sort of paternity without the purpose of bringing the children to manhood.

That is the real and original picture. That of the first volume was declamatory, common, hackneyed and false (Rubish, 2).

To reflect.

If, instead of the disordered despotism of the army rabble, idea already known, it would not be better to introduce here the portrait of a regulated despotism in which everything happens with as much order, meticulousness, and tyranny as in a barracks.

If instead of that I adopt the ancient idea of military despotism, there is at least a new notion to show.

It is military despotism following revolution and democratic anarchy, becoming established in a time when everything has been overturned and when nothing has yet settled down in positions, habits, ideas, tastes, when everything is in question, when the limits of the just and the unjust are abolished, when even the limits of practice and custom no longer exist, when we are accustomed to everything, when we expect anything in advance, when nothing is absolutely unforeseen and everything possible.

[To the side] Perhaps the image of the barracks could be placed after that as the port, the definitive state (YTC, CVd, pp. 15-16).

On the different types of despotism in the work of Tocqueville, see James T. Schleifer,The Making of Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” pp. 147-56, 179-85. Roger Boesche, “The Prison, Tocqueville’s Model for Despotism,” Western Political Quarterly 33, no. 4 (1980): 550-63, established some points of similarity between the despotism of Tocqueville and his idea of the prison.

[f. ] Liberty in the very midst of these diversions is always serious. But there is nothing so joyful as despotism. The sight of human miseries, the unhappy are its natural enemies. It loves on the contrary to find the image of joy everywhere in its path, and it is pleased with games and spectacles. However timid it is by its nature, it does not fear the excesses of a licentious gaity; and the foulest voluptuous pleasures do not frighten it. No one desires more than it does that peoples enjoy themselves, provided that they think only about enjoying themselves; and it willingly intoxicates them with pleasures so that they do more easily without happiness (YTC, CVd, p. 12).

In a similar fragment, on p. 13 of the same notebook, this sentence is found: “Only novice despots are enemies of joy. Free governments seek to give men happiness rather than pleasure” (YTC, CVd, p. 13). The rubish contains an identical passage.

[g. ] In the margin: “<Perhaps narrow this tableau. See the effect that it produces when reading.>”

[h. ] In the margin: “<See if this is not found word for word at individualism; that the idea was there would not be important.

“Very useful here, try to leave it.>”

[j. ] Note in the manuscript:

A draft comments:

[k. ] Toward the end of the manuscript of the chapter: “≠The aristocracy of England is the only one that knows how to defend itself and that has offered liberty to men at the cost of equality; it will fall, but it will fall slowly, and with glory.≠”

[m. ] There are men who have no will to distinguish themselves from their fellows; there are others who have, on the contrary, a permanent and continual will to do so. There are others finally who make only small efforts in order to raise themselves above the earth and who immediately fall back. The latter are the unhappiest of all; for they have the troubles of ambition without having the dubious pleasures of it.

All of man is in the will. His entire future is hidden there as in a germ that the first ray of good fortune comes to make fruitful. There are women who put qualities of character before everything, because those qualities provide the tranquillity of every day, and for those women the idea of happiness does not go beyond the tranquillity and peace of the household. Women of that kind recall to me those men who prefer the type of social paralysis given by despotism to the agitation and the great emotions of liberty. Both hold the same place in my estimation (YTC, CVa, p. 56).

[n. ] On a loose sheet of the manuscript:

[o. ] So you can say that for democratic peoples centralization is an innate idea. Not only will this monstrous concentration of all the social [v: political] powers in the same hands not shock the natural ideas of democratic peoples as regards government, but it will favor several of the secret instincts and the most lively tastes that equality [v: their social state] suggests.

Equality of conditions suggests naturally to men an intense and constant taste for material well-being. I said so elsewhere. I have also shown in another place how, as equality became greater, each man, finding himself more independent and more separated from his fellows, felt more disposed to consider himself (this word implies a contradiction with what precedes on the innate idea of centralization) separately and to live in isolation.

Those are powerful instruments of tyranny for whoever knows how to use them.

Far from combating these natural tendencies of a democratic social state, a government which aims for absolute power will work with all its power to make them irresistible, and it will inflame the passions that liberty should moderate or extinguish. There exist in the south of Europe petty princes whose tyranny is so touchy and so irksome that the life of the most inoffensive citizens [v: the most servile and the most peaceful souls are] was saddened and made uncomfortable by it. Those princes are, if I am not mistaken, clumsy despots. They bring to the execution of their designs more zeal than light, and they do not know that in the centuries in which we are living men are more disposed to bear that you violate their rights than their comforts.

[To the side: Two consequences of the taste for material well-being for a despot to look after: 1. Softening of souls which causes you no longer to have a taste for the highest pleasures that liberty provides; 2. Effort of the whole human spirit toward the acquisition of well-being, which causes you no longer to have the time to give yourself to those pleasures.]

The clever man who seeks to establish absolute power among a democratic nation will demand only one thing from the citizens: that they do not get involved in the government and contract none of the habits that can in the long run lead men to get involved in it. But he will also work hard to make civil life as independent, as prosperous, as easy as it can be without political liberty. He will facilitate material well-being with all his power; he will honor it, he will glorify it each day in the eyes of the crowd, and pushing with all his power the souls that are naturally inclined toward solely the enjoyments of the senses, he will turn them away from the most beautiful works and the most noble pleasures of man.

Among democratic peoples men have little leisure; they are all naturally very occupied with their private affairs and only impatiently do they bear being turned away from them. The concern for common interests distracts and fatigues them; the sovereign power appears and unburdens them. Do not believe that it intends to oppress them in this way; it is relieving them. It carefully organizes the time of which they make such good use, and removes from them the troubles and the worries of government in order to deliver them entirely to concerns about their private fortunes.

So the State is full of solicitude for the happiness of the citizens, but it wants to be the unique agent and the sole (illegible word) of it. It is the State that takes care of providing their security, facilitating their pleasures, directing the principal affairs; the State itself creates roads, digs canals, directs industries, divides inheritances. It may even be able to plow the earth and finally take away from each man even the difficulty of living!

Equality of conditions has prepared men for all these things; it has disposed them to bear them and often even to regard them as a good.

This is how, aiding itself sometimes with the vices of men, sometimes with their weaknesses, often with their inexperience, the central power little by little andwithout effort takes hold of the entire life of a democratic people. It does not tear their rights away from them; their rights are abandoned to it. It does not do violence to mores [v: sentiments]; it does not overturn ideas, but it gently directs both toward servitude.

Here it is, acknowledged arbiter of everything. Society does nothing for itself, and it does everything. Divided from his fellows, each citizen thinks only of himself. The source of public virtues has dried up.

[What will the first tyrant who is coming be called? I do not know, but he is approaching. What is still missing for this deceptive symbol of public order to disappear and for a profound and incurable disorder to be revealed?

What more is needed for this sublime authority, for this visible providence that we have established among us to be able to trample underfoot the most holy laws, do violence as it pleases to our hearts and walk over our heads? War. Peace has prepared despotism, war establishes it.

[In the margin: Not only as a consequence of victory, but war alone by the need for power and for concentration that it creates.

A new aristocracy of soldiers is the only one that seems to me still practical.(YTC, CVd, pp. 3-4, 8-9, 9-10, 10-12).

There are several variants of these passages in the same pages. In another place, Tocqueville repeats: “When I said that there was no more aristocracy possible, I was mistaken; you can still have the aristocracy of men of war” (YTC, CVd, p. 26).

[p. ] The French believe that centralization is French. They are wrong; it is democratic and I dare to predict that all peoples whose social state will be the same and who follow only the instincts that this social state suggests will arrive at the point where we are./

Destroy classes, equalize ranks, make men similar, and you will see power become centralized as if by itself, whatever the country, the genius of the people or the state of enlightenment. Particular circumstances will be able to hasten the natural movement or slow it down, but not stop it or create an opposite one.

[To the side: Contained within certain limits, centralization is a necessary fact, and I add that it is a fact about which we must be glad./

A strong and intelligent central power is one of the first political necessities in centuries of equality. Acknowledge it boldly] (Rubish, 2).

Already in 1828, in an already quoted letter to Gustave de Beaumont, Tocqueville said of Edward I: “He reestablished order and made good civil laws which, as you know, often make people forget about good political laws” (Correspondance avec Beaumont, OC, VIII, 1, p. 55).

[q. ] “<This is seen above all today in the nations of Europe, still half filled with liberal passions that arose from the struggle with aristocracy, working hard to find a form of government that at the same time satisfies the love that they still have for independence and the new instincts that make them tend toward servitude>” (Note in the drafts that could also refer to another part of the chapter, Rubish, 2).

[r. ] In the margin: “<I do not know if, everything considered, this is still not the best course that you can reasonably hope from equality and the only type of liberty that it is capable of allowing to men.>”

And a little further along: “<All the end of the chapter starting from here seems to me to come to an end too abruptly. All the more because that is the most vulnerable side and the most interesting side of the entire book.>”

[s. ] In the margin: “<This is not relevant because I have already ruled out the idea of tyranny above.>”

[t. ] Title on a jacket:

There are other versions of this paragraph in CVd, pp. 48-52. Following the coup d’état of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, Tocqueville will abandon all political activity. In February 1852, he writes to a friend, with an entirely similar tone:

[u. ] In the margin:

[v. ] The Americans have avoided these first dangers of democratic infancy. Although they have granted immense rights to society, they have not sacrificed the individual to it. They have left to the latter, outside of the political world, a great security and a great independence. They have not given the government the same civil privileges, and they have not put it beyond the reach and the control of the judicial power by requiring in a stupid manner as we the necessity of the division of powers (unity, centralization, administrative despotism,Rubish, 2).

[w. ] Note at the end of the manuscript of the chapter:

[x. ] Unity, centralization./

We believe we are making a clever and sufficient concession by allowing these same men, almost entirely deprived of their free will in every day actions, to unite now and then to choose one of the three great powers. In other words, after refusing to them the right to direct their own affairs, we concede to them the privilege of governing the State.

[To the side: The idea opposite is good. If I want to strike minds by the picture of administrative despotism, I must move away as little as possible from what we see before our eyes. A tyranny of the Caesars was a bogeyman that cannot make anyone afraid, although at bottom that is not so unreasonable as we think. I must not aim to say the most complete truth, but the most easily grasped and the most useful.]

This is a very insufficient and very dangerous remedy.

A national assembly named by such voters cannot fail to be revolutionary or servile.

It is a great foolishness to hope to make a strong, liberal, energetic and wise government emerge from a people of servants./

6 April 1838 (Rubish, 2).

On another page, Tocqueville adds: “I cannot prevent myself from considering this form of government as transitory. It leads necessarily to institutions truly [v: more] liberal or to the non-accountable despotism of one man” (Rubish, 2).

[y. ] “Those who believe they are able to stop for long at a government which is republican at its head and ultra-monarchical at its tail, chambers and a centralized administration, are great fools. But the thing can go for a while in this way. Portray it in the place where I do the portrait of democratic despotism.

“22 June” (Rubish, 2).

[a. ] The jacket that contains the manuscript of the chapter also contains Tocqueville’s working manuscript and a copy of the entire chapter written in his hand. You can read on the jacket: “Continuation of the preceding chapter./

“[In pencil] I bet that M. de C[hateaubriand? (ed.)]. did not understand this chapter.

“20 minutes.”

In the plan for the fourth part included in Rubish, 1 (contained in a jacket that is found with the drafts of the chapter on material enjoyments and that bears the title how equality of ranks suggests to men the taste for liberty and for equality), the chapter on the type of despotism is followed by another with the title what must be done to turn aside this danger. Tocqueville notes to the side of the title: “This title contains the idea, but not the expression that this idea must have. The title drafted in this way would be too ambitious. It would promise more than I can keep.”

The same idea is found on the jacket that contains the manuscript: “This title means nothing at all, but all those that I want to put in its place mean too much. The only real title would be: What must be done to avoid the evils that I point out in the preceding chapters. But such a title would announce much more than the chapter can hold; in such a case, it is better to be useless than ambitious.”

[b. ] “The social state separates men, the political state must draw them closer./

“The social state gives them the taste for well-being [v: inclines them toward the earth], the political state must raise them up by giving them great ideas and great emotions” (Rubish, 2).

[c. ] From now on the atmosphere that surrounds us will be democratic, you will be able to breathe only on condition of taking up your position there.

There show how the members of the aristocracy can without haste and without delay, without pride and without servility, draw closer to the people and, abandoning the memories of another time, take a place in the present time . . .

Then add.

As for those who will want to hold themselves aside, hoping to escape in this way the common destruction and to preserve for other times the elements of an aristocracy, they will soon discover that life is tiring and difficult for them. Surrounded by hostile prejudices, the butt of suspicions, forced to breathe on all sides the air of hatred, objects of pity and envy at the same time, more strangers in the country where they were born than the traveler who comes to find shelter under their roof, they will be like the Jews after the destruction of the temple; like [them (ed.)], they will constantly await a Messiah who must not come. But they will differ from the Jews on one point; they will not perpetuate themselves. An aristocracy in vain wants to outlive its grandeur and to preserve itself intact amid the ruin of the institutions that it established; it cannot succeed. And if its enemies are powerless to accomplish its ruin, it will soon take charge itself of accomplishing it. Careers that gain honors and glory are closed to its members, and they refuse to embrace professions that give or preserve wealth. So they are as if struck with immobility amid the universal movement;among a people in which all work, they are reduced to an idleness so complete that you have never seen any thing like it. Within the most aristocratic [democratic (ed.)] societies this immense and useless leisure overwhelms them. A restless boredom devours them. Since they cannot obtain the most noble pleasures of men, they seek the tumultuous and coarse enjoyments that tear them violently away from themselves, and they console themselves with horses and dogs for not being able to govern the State. They have neither the courtesy nor the energy of their ancestors; they have only preserved their pride. And you are astonished by the unimaginable sterility of the races most fruitful in great men./

At every moment the law of inheritances comes to surprise a few among them amid these obscene and unworthy leisure activities and throws them into obscurity and poverty. The solitude then becomes more profound around those who remain, the isolation more frightening, the discouragement more complete every day; a name is lost, a precious memory fades, the trace of several generations gone by disappears. New families come out of the void into which the first descend. Power, wealth and glory have forever passed into other hands.

I am profoundly convinced that it is no less impossible to establish a new aristocracy than to preserve the ruins of the former aristocracy. For my part, I cannot understand the fears that are inspired among the friends of democracy, openly or in secret, by those who intend to re-create to a certain measure ranks, privileges, hereditary rights, permanent influences. Such men are dangerous only to themselves. They only compromise the cause that they embrace and the conservative doctrines that they mix with it.

The current of the century is against them, and the day when finally they want seriously to raise the dike that is to contain it, they will immediately be swept away forever by it. So democracy has henceforth nothing to fear from its adversaries. It is from within that its corrupters and its masters will come. I do not see how its reign could be prevented from becoming established, but I easily discover what must be done to make it detestable./

What is the danger?

To flatter the feelings of democratic hate and envy and to gain power in this way.

To give equality lavishly, to take away liberty in return (YTC, CVc, pp. 55-58).

F. D. often repeats that an aristocracy is a command staff. That is a good definition. An aristocracy is not a body by itself all alone, but the head of a body. Reduced to itself it can still do brilliant things, but not great and lasting things.

This comparison of an aristocracy to a command staff was found with a rigorous exactitude in 1792. The officers being all gathered on the right of the Rhine, the soldiers remained on the left bank. This was the final demonstration of what I said above, the most striking image of the state of French society (YTC, CVa, pp. 52-53). The same idea appears in YTC, CVc, p. 55.

[d. ] In the margin of the copy of the chapter, in pencil: “I strongly persist in asking deletion.”

[e. ] “In democratic societies not only is the government stronger (illegible word) than the citizens, but also it alone has duration, foresight, extended plans, profound calculations. It surpasses the citizens as much in quality as in strength. At the next-to-last chapter. 1 September 1838” (YTC, CVk, 1, p. 23).

[f. ] In the margin: “Men who live in centuries of equality are naturally isolated and powerless; it is only by the artificial and temporary combination of their efforts that they can attain great objectives.”

[g. ] Notes on a page at the end of the manuscript of the chapter:

The same idea is expressed in a rough draft:

[j. ] Remedies to democracy indicated in the course of the book, to gather together perhaps in the first or final chapter.

[In the margin: Try to arrive at the same conclusion by another path than in political society.]

Necessity of not giving omnipotence to the majority in order not to lose the liberty to act which results naturally from a democratic social state.

Necessity of introducing liberty among a democratic people in order to give it the necessary movement toward things of the mind.

Pour out enlightenment lavishly in democratic nations in order to elevate the tendencies of the human mind. Democracy without enlightenment and liberty would lead the human species back to barbarism.

Necessity of beliefs in order to immaterialize the lives of democratic peoples.Democratic peoples can be grasped only by them. Religion is an almost non-material interest which gives celestial thoughts./

Do not adopt one social principle alone however good it seems.

Do not use one form of government alone. Stay away from acridity [unity? (ed.)] (YTC, CVk, 2, pp. 54-55).

[k. ] “Only provincial institutions can make the democratic instinct of liberty a habit” (YTC, CVd, p. 19).

[m. ] This fragment is found in the copy of the chapter.

[n. ] “As for me, all that I wish for my country is that those who aim for despotism there aim at the same time for aristocracy” (YTC, CVd, p. 25).

[o. ] In a jacket with rough drafts of the chapter which bears the title idea of aristocratic persons:

On the question of associations for Tocqueville, see: Renato Cavallaro, “Dall’individualismo al controllo democratico: aspetti del pensiero di Alexis de Tocqueville sull’associazionismo volontario,” Critica Sociologica, 28, 1973-1974, pp. 99-125; William H. George, “Montesquieu and De Tocqueville and Corporative Individualism,” American Political Science Review 16, no. 1 (1922): 10-21; Georges Gojat, “Les corps inter-médiaires et la décentralisation dans l’oeuvre de Tocqueville,” in Libéralisme, tradition-alisme, décentralisation (Paris: Armand Colin, 1952), pp. 1-43; and José María Sauca Cano, La ciencia de la asociación de Tocqueville (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Constitucionales, 1995).

[p. ] In the margin: “The entire style of this chapter is defective and to review, but the thoughts are so difficult that at this moment I can only concern myself with them.”

[q. ] In the margin: “The weaker individuals are, the stronger the courts must be.”

[r. ] With the rough drafts of this chapter, you find a fragment on forms, poorly drafted, and which seems to be in the hand of Louis de Kergorlay. See note u of p. 1273 and note g of p. 750. A note in the rubish mentions: “I had a good conversation with Louis about this entire subject; look at it again” (Rubish, 2).

[s. ] “All peoples who have done great things for liberty have had the taste [v: the faith] and I could almost say superstition for forms./

“Forms are not liberty, but they are its body” (Rubish, 2).

[t. ] [The beginning is missing (ed.)] that the confidence in the idea of the right of reason that is spreading each day, do you not notice that each day the idea of fact and of force replaces it, and what is the final and legitimate representative of force, if not the soldier?

[To the side: Do you not see that with equality without liberty we are marching toward a singular servitude and toward an inevitable barbarism? And if you see all these things, what are you doing?]

Do you not see that opinions are dividing more quickly than patrimonies, that each man is enclosing himself narrowly within his own mind, like the farm laborer in his field?

[To the side: Do you not see that souls are falling lower and that the love of liberty, this great and noble passion of man, is deserting him?]

That egoism is constantly taking on new strength without acquiring new light?

The idea of right which is being extinguished.

That sentiments become more individual each day, and that soon men will be more separated by their beliefs than they have ever been by inequality of conditions? (YTC, CVd, pp. 19-20).

[u. ] Definition of revolutionary spirit:

The revolutionary spirit which everywhere is the greatest enemy of liberty and is such above all among democratic peoples, because there is a natural and secret bond between it and democracy. It takes its source in the natural faults of democracy and scorns them.

A revolution can sometimes be just and necessary; it can establish liberty, but the revolutionary spirit is always detestable and can never lead to anything except to tyranny (Rubish, 2).

[v. ] In the margin of the copy: “<Where the passing sentiments that revolution suggests find themselves in sympathy with the permanent sentiments that equality gives.>”

[w. ] In the margin of the copy: “Perhaps delete that?”

[x. ] “I would very much like you to tell me what makes the grandeur of man if it is not man himself./

“Who the devil does it concern except each one of us?” (Rubish, 2).

[y. ] They limit themselves to wanting society to be great; I, man; they are interested in an ideal being, without a body; I, in God’s creature, in my fellow man./

They attach more value to the work; I, to the worker./

To raise up and to make the individual greater, constant goal of great men in democratic centuries./

This 29 January 1838 (Rubish, 2).

Another rough draft expresses the same thought:

[z. ] The manuscript and the copy of the chapter finish here. In the margin of the manuscript you find this note:

[a. ] The great men of paganism have often willingly sacrificed to false gods [v: idols] in which they did not believe, because they knew that peoples could imagine only under this crude image the idea of the divinity, one and supreme, belief in which is necessary to humanity.

In the same way statesmen, who know that legality is not order [v: is only the external form of order and not order], must however honor it [v: bend their knees before it] as the only permanent image of order that can be grasped by the organs of the common people [vulgarius ](Rubish, 2).

[b. ] Idea of the [blank (ed.)] to show that the taste for independence is natural to men in times of equality and why; but that it is a secondary taste almost always subordinate to the taste for power; that this natural tendency toward liberty is however our anchor of salvation; that it is by developing it and by making it practical and manly that you can hope to obtain all the good of equality without its evils (YTC, CVk, 2, p. 49).

[c. ] “It is a matter above all of proving that it is with the help of liberty that you can hope to prevent license. Everything is there. Fear must be put on the side of liberty if you want to succeed” (YTC, CVk, 2, pp. 52-53).

[a. ] In the first box of the Rubish (Rubish, 1), with the chapter on material enjoyments, in a jacket bearing the title how equality of ranks suggests to men the taste for liberty and for equality, you find this note: “Perhaps finish by a chapter entitled general view of the subject, in which I recall the fatal march of equality. Perhaps here I will show that it is only by democracy that you can attenuate the evils of democracy, the impossibility and the danger of the government of the middle classes, the necessity to aim firmly for the government of all by all.” (Rubish, 1). In the second box of the Rubish, the rough drafts and notes of this chapter are accompanied by various papers contained in a jacket that has as a title of the manner in which the american governments act vis-à-vis associations. Tocqueville noted to the side: “I propose to delete this chapter.” The ideas of these pages are found in different places in the last chapters.

[b. ] [On a jacket: Last chapter. General view of the subject./

General appraisal of the effects of equality./

I can [only (ed.)] approach this summary frankly and grandly, otherwise it would seem out of place and incomplete. I must show myself wanting to reduce the entire picture that I have just painted to a narrow frame, setting aside details, or closing my eyes to them, no longer occupying myself with America, which opened the path to me; and after thus preparing the reader for something very general and with very few details, to keep the piece: I look at my country . . .

To begin by recalling the march of the four volumes.]

Capital and principal idea./

Influence of democracy on human morality.

Medium morality, perhaps in the view of God.

Interest which gains, men not virtuous, but steady.

Final chapter. I think. All of man is there./

Chapter too vast, too thorny. To refrain probably.

[On the following page] A final chapter.

Less individual independence, more national strength.

Less independence, more security.

Less independence of the sovereign, more independence of the subjects.

[On the following page] I do not believe in the definitive organization of the government of the middle classes, and if I believed it possible, I would oppose myself to it.

Idea to put in the place where I show again the fatal march of equality.

[Here we omit several paragraphs (ed.).]

[On the following page] Finish the book by a great chapter that tries to summarize all the democratic subject and to draw from it oratorically the consequences for the world and in particular for Europe and us. Maxims of conciliation, of resignation, of union with the march of Providence, complete impartiality.

A simple and solemn movement, like the subject./

Capital idea.

That it is necessary to draw yourself out of particular points of view in order to place yourself, if possible, in general points of view that do not depend on either times or places. Penetrate as deeply as possible into the thought of God and judge from there.

[On the following page] Use democracy to moderate democracy. That is the sole path of salvation that is open to us. Discern the sentiments, the ideas, the laws that, without being hostile to the principles of democracy, without being naturally incompatible with democracy, can however correct its unfortunate tendencies and, while modifying it, become incorporated with it.

Beyond that everything is foolish and imprudent (YTC, CVk, 2, pp. 50-52).

In Tocqueville’s papers you find these other plans:

[c. ] In the margin: “<I cast my eyes over my country and I see there a universal transformation. I widen my view, I carry it by degrees to the extreme limits of the vast space occupied on the globe by the European race; everywhere I am struck by an analogous spectacle. Among all peoples, ancient institutions and ancient mores have disappeared or are disappearing in order to give place to something different. Everything that exists today [interrupted text (ed.)].>”

[d. ] In the margin: “<This picture seems good enough to me, but it is incomplete. It perhaps contains some useless things, and there are some necessary ones to .-.-. To complete it, it is necessary to have gone through the whole book.>”

[e. ] It is necessary to find in some part of the work, in the foreword or the last chapter, the idea of the middle that has been so dishonored in our times. Show that there is a firm, clear, voluntary way to see and to grasp the truth between two extremes. To conceive and to say that the truth is not in an absolute system.

[In the margin: I do not like the middle to be taken between grandeur and baseness, between courage and fear, between vice and virtue. But I like the middle between two opposite excesses.]

Dare to say somewhere the idea of L[ouis (ed.)]. that a difference must be made between absolute affirmation [v: certitude] and Pyrrhonism, that the system of probabilities is the only true one, the only human one, provided that probability causes you to act as energetically as certitude.

All that is poorly said, but the germ is there (YTC, CVk, 1, pp. 41-42).

[f. ] “Who knows if, in the eyes of God, the beautiful is not the useful?” (YTC, CVa, p. 41).

[g. ] “You must not aim to make democratic peoples as similar as possible to aristocratic nations, but to gain for them as much as possible the type of grandeur and prosperity that is appropriate to them” (Rubish, 2).

[h. ] Equality of conditions, the absence of classes . . . are evils you say. It belittles human nature, establishes the mediocre in everything. Perhaps you are right.

Do you know a means to cure the evil by the opposites, that is to say by the reestablishment or even the maintaining of inequality, the permanent classification of men? No. At the very bottom of your heart you do not believe in the possibility of all these things.

But admitting that equality of conditions is an invincible fact, you contest its consequences in the political world; and you attack liberty and call despotism to your aid, and seek to assure present security at the expense of future races.

And it is here that you are clearly wrong. For there is only democracy (by this word I mean self-government) that can diminish and make bearable the inevitable evils of a democratic social state.

5 September 1837 (YTC, CVk, 2, p. 53).

[j. ] I see two distinct roads that open at the same time before the men of today. They touch at first, but as they get farther from the common point of departure, they move away from each other and an immense space between them is found at the end. The one leads to liberty and the other leads to servitude. And as you march along one or along the other, liberty becomes greater and servitude heavier. Each day that the space separating them expands, it is more difficult to cross it to find the good road again. Peoples have not yet reached the place where they must choose between these two paths. But all are getting closer to it. An irresistible force is pushing them there. I already see the first advancing. The others follow the first at unequal distances.

Although I may be the last one in this holy league, if it is forming, I am content.

Some push them toward chaos, the others drag them, little by little and without noticing, perhaps, toward the most stupefying of all servitudes. The nations hesitate, become disturbed and falter . . .

Oh! Who will open the way, who will carry the new banner, who will give his name to this glorious dawning. One man, whoever he may be, cannot do it, but an association of men could do so. Association of disinterested, honest or enterprising men (illegible word) sentiments . . . I will be distressed by them, but let me be allowed to say that I am not afraid of them.

As for my opinions on all the others, I do not defend myself; the public is the judge.

[On another page] I said at the beginning of this long work that peoples (vol. 1, p. 90) could draw two great political consequences from the democratic social state, that these consequences differed prodigiously from each other, but that they both emerged from the same fact. Here I am at the end of my course, and I feel myself more firm in this belief (YTC, CVd, pp. 20-22). Tocqueville is referring to the last paragraphs of chapter III of the first part of the first volume (p. 90).

And in the same line:

[m. ] “I am profoundly convinced that democracy can be regulated and organized; it is not something easy, but it is something that can be done, and I add that it is the only thing left to do” (YTC, CVd, p. 19).

[n. ] “A man is never master of his destiny because death can come to seize him in the execution of his wisest plans, but a people, which does not perish, remains always master of itself ” (Rubish, 2).