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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 ]

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].

[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).