Our Libertarian Socialism

In his extraordinary reflections in Chapter VI of Democracy in America, which is worth reading at least once a year, Alexis de Tocqueville wonders what sort of “despotism” is in store for the newly-emerging democracies of the Western world. Despotism? Why, surely this strikes us as a strange fear when we have been taught that democracy is the proper response to despotism, and not one of its types. But he begins by observing that “no sovereign has ever lived in former ages, so absolute or so powerful as to undertake to administer by his own agency all the parts of a great empire,” and while former rulers had great power, it touched very few, it neglected the masses, and the myriad details of social and private life, work, and occupation were practically and properly beyond the ruler’s control. But de Tocqueville observed that in a democratic system, where the emphasis is on envy and equality, everything is muted. Men are restrained in their vices, he wrote, but also in their virtues. He was not afraid, he said, that citizens in democracies “will meet with tyrants in their rulers, but rather with guardians.” His great fear was not physical terror, but what he called “administrative despotism.” Below I reproduce his most important words on this topic, verbatim.

“The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasure with which they glut their lives … Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood … It provides for their security … manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulate the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? … The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.

“After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned them at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes and stupefies a people, until each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

“I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.

“Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led, and they wish to remain free. As they cannot destroy either the one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite: they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians… the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master and then relapse into it again …”

“The democratic nations that have introduced freedom into their political constitution at the very time when they were augmenting the despotism of their administrative constitution have been led into strange paradoxes. To manage those minor affairs in which good sense is all that is wanted, the people are held to be unequal to the task; but when the government of the country is at stake, the people are vested with immense powers; they are alternately made the playthings of their ruler, and his masters - more than kings, and less then men … No one will ever believe that a liberal, wise, and energetic government can spring from the suffrages of a subservient people.”

Comments

[D. Hauser]

Can I recommend to you, Mr. Gairdner,a perhaps forgotten piece by Marcuse (maybe because it's so reasonable) called "the stuggle between liberalism and totalitarianism." It appeared in one of his sixties collections called "negations" and Herbert spent a fair bit of time denying the validity of the translation. The problem was, I think his translator got it right. as Alasdair McIntyre said, some of the "repellent" quality came through better in the original than in the trans.