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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 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

[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).