S23 DC

Political Consequences of the Social State of the Anglo-Americans

The political consequences of such a social state are easy to deduce.

It is impossible to think that equality will not end up penetrating the political world just as it has penetrated elsewhere. One cannot conceive of men eternally unequal among themselves with respect to a single point and equal with respect to the others; they will therefore, after a time, arrive at being equal in all.

Now, I know of only two ways of making equality prevail in the political world: one must give rights to every citizen or not give them to anyone.

For the peoples who have reached the same social state as the Anglo-Americans, it is therefore very difficult to perceive a middle term between the sovereignty of all and the absolute power of one alone.

One must not delude oneself that the social state I have just described does not lend itself almost as easily to either of these two consequences.

There is, in fact, a virile and legitimate passion for equality which provokes all men to want to be strong and esteemed. This passion tends to elevate the small to the rank of the great; but there is also in the human [53] heart a depraved taste for equality, which leads the weak to want to draw the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to a preference for equality in servitude over inequality in liberty. It is not that the peoples whose social state is democratic naturally disdain liberty; on the contrary, they have an instinctive taste for it. But liberty is not the principal and constant object of their desire; what they love with an eternal love is equality; they rush forward toward liberty by rapid impulse and by sudden efforts, and, if they miss the goal, they resign themselves to it; but nothing can satisfy them without equality, and they would rather consent to perish than to lose it.

On the other hand, when the citizens are all almost equal, it becomes difficult for them to defend their independence against the assaults of power. None among them then being strong enough to struggle alone with advantage, it is only the combination of the forces of all of them which can guarantee liberty. Now, such a combination does not always exist.

Peoples can therefore draw two great political consequences from the same social state: these consequences differ prodigiously among themselves, but they both result from the same fact.

As the first ones presented with this fearsome alternative that I have just described, the Anglo-Americans have been rather fortunate to avoid absolute power. Their circumstances, their origin, their enlightenment, and above all their mores, have allowed them to found and to maintain the sovereignty of the people.

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i capitaux mobiliers: literally, “movable capital or assets.” Real assets or capital like the landed estates Tocqueville discusses are immobliers, “immovable.”

ii In this paragraph Tocqueville plays on the double meaning—moral and economic—of the word intérêt, “interest.” The law of inheritance once supported “a great interest” (un grand intérêt) in the conservation of great estates; its dismantling brings to the fore the “pecuniary interest” (intérêt pécuniaire) in selling them. Not only does personal property yield a higher return (plus d’intérêts: “more interests”) than real property, but great estates, Tocqueville will say in the next paragraph, yield proportionately less return than small estates. Tocqueville constantly discusses how men become interested in one thing or another. In view of the importance of “interest rightly understood”—intérêt bien entendu—in Tocqueville’s thought, his every use of the word intérêt merits attention.

iii The words translated as “are prosperous” are ont de l’aisance. Aisance is a level of wealth that is not rich but allows for a commodious life, a life of ease (aise).

1. I mean by the laws of inheritance all the laws whose principal goal is to settle the disposition of property after the death of the owner.

The law of entail is one of these; it also has the result, it is true, of preventing the proprietor from disposing of his property before his death; but it imposes on him the obligation to conserve his property only with a view to passing it on intact to his heir. The principal goal of the law of entail is therefore to settle the disposition of property after the death of the proprietor. The rest is the means that it employs.

2. I do not mean that the small proprietor farms better, but that he farms with more passion and more care, and makes up by work what he lacks in art.

3. The earth being the most solid form of property, one encounters from time to time rich men who are disposed to make great sacrifices in order to acquire it and who are willing to lose a considerable portion of their revenue in order to secure the rest. But these are accidents. The love of property in land is no longer normally found except in the case of the poor person. The small landed proprietor, who has less enlightenment, less imagination, and less passion than the great, is in general preoccupied only with the desire to increase his property, and it often happens that inheritance, marriage, or commercial luck furnish him little by little with the means to do so.

Alongside the disposition which leads men to divide the earth, there therefore exists another which leads them to aggregate it. This disposition, which is sufficient for preventing properties from being infinitely divided, is not strong enough for creating great landed wealth nor above all for maintaining it in the same families.

[54] CHAPTER 4

THE PRINCIPLE OF THE SOVEREIGNTY

OF THE PEOPLE IN AMERICA

It dominates all of American society.—The application of this principle that the Americans were already making before their revolution.—The development that was given to it by this revolution.—The gradual and irresistible lowering of the property qualification for voting.

When one wishes to speak of the political laws of the United States, one must always start with the dogma of the sovereignty of the people.

The principle of the sovereignty of the people, which always exists more or less at the bottom of almost all human institutions, ordinarily remains, so to speak, buried there. One obeys it without recognizing it, or if sometimes it happens to appear for a moment in broad daylight, one soon hastens to plunge it back into the shadows of the sanctuary.

The national will is one of those terms that has been the most widely abused by intriguers of all times and demagogues of all ages. Some saw its expression in the votes bought by a few agents of power; others, in the votes of an interested or fearful minority; there are even some who have discovered it fully expressed in the silence of peoples, and who have thought that from the fact of obedience issued, for them, the right of command.

In America, the principle of the sovereignty of the people is not hidden or sterile as it is among certain nations: it is recognized by the mores, proclaimed by the laws; it expands with liberty and attains its ultimate consequences without obstacles.

If there is a single country in the world where one may hope to appreciate on its just merits the dogma of the sovereignty of the people, to study it in its application to the affairs of society, and to judge its advantages and dangers, that country is assuredly America.

I have said previously that, from the beginning, the principle of the [55] sovereignty of the people had been the generative principle of the majority of the English colonies in America.

At that time, however, it was far from dominating the government of the society as it does in our day.

Two obstacles, one internal, the other external, slowed down its invasive march.

It could not show itself openly in the laws since the colonies were still constrained to obey the mother country; it was thus reduced to concealing itself in the provincial assemblies and above all in the township. There it spread in secret.

At that time, American society was not yet prepared to adopt it in all of its consequences. Enlightenment in New England, and riches south of the Hudson, exercised for a long time, as I have shown in the preceding chapter, a sort of aristocractic influence which tended to compress into a few hands the exercise of the powers of society. It was still far from being the case that all public officials were elective and all citizens electors. The right to vote was everywhere constrained within certain limits and subordinated to the existence of a property qualification for voting. This property qualification was very weak in the North, more considerable in the South.

The American Revolution broke out. The dogma of the sovereignty of the people emerged from the township and took possession of the government; all classes put themselves at risk for its cause; one fought and triumphed in its name; it became the law of laws.

A change almost as rapid occurred in the interior of the society. The law of inheritance completed the breaking up of local influences.

At the moment when this effect of the laws and of the Revolution began to reveal itself to everyone’s eyes, victory had already been irrevocably pronounced in favor of democracy. Power was, by this fact, in democracy’s hands. It was no longer even permissible to struggle against it. The upper classes therefore submitted without a murmur and without struggle to an evil that was henceforth inevitable. What ordinarily happens to fallen powers happened to them: individual egoism took hold of their members; since they could no longer tear power from the hands of the people, and because they did not detest the multitude enough to take pleasure in defying it, they no longer thought of anything except winning its goodwill at any price. The most democratic laws were therefore passed in a mutual rivalry by the men whose interests they hurt the most. In this manner, the upper classes did not arouse popular passions against themselves, but they themselves hastened the triumph of the new order. Thus—singular phenomenon!—the democratic impulse was all the more irresistible in the States where aristocracy had the deepest roots.

The state of Maryland, which had been founded by great lords, proclaimed [56] the first universal suffrage1 and introduced into the whole of its government the most democratic forms.

When a people begins to tamper with the property qualification for voting, one can predict that it will end up, after a more or less long period of time, making it disappear completely. That is one of the most invariable rules governing societies. As the limitation on electoral rights is reduced, the need to reduce it still more is felt; because, after each new concession, the forces of democracy increase and its demands grow with its new power. The ambition of those who are left below the property qualification is inflamed in proportion to the great number of those who are above it. The exception finally becomes the rule; concessions follow upon one another without respite, and one no longer stops until one has arrived at universal suffrage.

In our day, the principle of the sovereignty of the people has attained in the United States all of the practical developments that the imagination can conceive. It has freed itself from all the fictions with which one took care to surround it elsewhere; one sees it assume every form, according to the necessity of the case. Sometimes the people in a body make the laws as in Athens; sometimes deputies, which universal suffrage has created, represent it and act in its name under its almost immediate surveillance.

There are countries where a power, in a way external to the social body, acts on it and forces it to march in a certain path.

There are others where force is divided, being placed at one and the same time in the society and outside of it. Nothing like this is seen in the United States; there, society acts by itself and on itself. Power exists only within it; one comes across almost nobody who dares to conceive and above all express the idea of seeking it elsewhere. The people take part in composing the laws by choosing the legislators and in their application by electing the agents of the executive power. One can say that the people governs itself, so much is the share left to the administration weak and restricted, so much does the latter feel the influence of its popular origin and obey the power from which it emanates. The people reign over the American political world like God over the the universe. It is the cause and the end of all things; everything emerges from it and everything is absorbed into it.

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1. Amendments made to the constitution of Maryland in 1801 and 1809.

[57] CHAPTER 5

THE NECESSITY OF STUDYING WHAT HAPPENS WITHIN

THE PARTICULAR STATES BEFORE DISCUSSING

THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNION

I propose to examine, in the following chapter, what is, in America, the form of government founded on the principle of the sovereignty of the people; what are its means of action, its problems, its advantages, and its dangers.

A first difficulty presents itself: the United States has a complex constitution; one notices there two distinct societies engaged, and, if I may explain myself thus, fitted into one another. One sees two governments completely separate and almost independent: the one, ordinary and without well-defined limits, which answers to the daily needs of the society, the other, exceptional and circumscribed, which only applies to certain general interests. The former are, in a word, twenty-four small sovereign nations, of which the totality forms the great body of the Union.

To examine the Union before studying the State, is to go down a road littered with obstacles. The form of the Federal government of the United States emerged last: it was only a modification of the republic, a summary of political principles widespread in the entire society before its emergence and subsisting there independently of it. In addition, the Federal government, as I have just said, is only an exception; the government of the States is the common rule. The writer who would like to make the totality of such a picture understood before having pointed out its details would necessarily fall into obscurities or redundancies.

The great political principles which today govern American society were born and developed in the State; one can have no doubt of it. It is therefore the State which must be understood in order to have the key to all the rest.

The States which in our day compose the American Union all present, with respect to the exterior aspect of their institutions, the same [58] spectacle. Political and administrative life there is concentrated in three centers of activity that one might compare to the different nervous centers that make the human body move.

On the first rung is the township, higher up the county, and finally the State.

The Municipal System in America

Why the author begins his examination of political institutions with the municipality.—The municipality is found among all peoples.—Difficulty of establishing and conserving municipal liberty.—Its importance.—Why the author chose the municipal organization of New England as the principal object of his examination.

It is not by chance that I examine the municipality first.

The municipality is the only association that is so natural that everywhere men are brought together, a municipality forms by itself.

Municipal society thus exists among all peoples, no matter what their customary practices and their laws; it is man who makes kingdoms and creates republics; the municipality appears to come directly from the hands of God. But if the municipality exists from the moment that there are men, municipal liberty is a rare and fragile thing. A people can always set up great political assemblies, because there is usually found within it a certain number of men whose enlightenment substitutes up to a point for the normal practice of political affairs. The municipality is composed of cruder elements that often resist the action of the legislator. The difficulty of establishing the independence of municipalities, instead of diminishing as nations become enlightened, increases with their enlightenment. A very civilized society tolerates only with difficulty the efforts made by municipal liberty: it is appalled by the sight of its numerous aberrations, and despairs of success before having reached the final result of the experiment.

Among all liberties, that of municipalities, which is so difficult to establish, is also the one most exposed to the invasions of power. Left to themselves, municipal institutions would scarcely be able to struggle against an enterprising and strong government; in order to defend themselves successfully, it is necessary for them to have become fully developed and to have entered into national ideas and habits. Thus, to the extent that municipal liberty has not entered into mores, it is easy to destroy, and [59] it cannot enter into mores until it has subsisted for a long time in the laws.

Municipal liberty thus eludes, so to speak, the effort of man. In consequence, it rarely happens that it is created; it comes into being in a way on its own. It develops almost in secret in the depths of a semibarbaric society. It is the continuous action of laws and mores, circumstances and, above all, time, that succeeds in consolidating it. Of all the nations of the continent of Europe, one can say that there is not a single one of them that understands municipal liberty.

It is, however, in the municipality that the strength of free peoples resides. Municipal institutions are to liberty what primary schools are to knowledge; they place it within reach of the people; they give them the experience of the peaceful exercise of it and habituate them to make use of it. Without municipal institutions a nation may give itself a free government, but it does not have the spirit of liberty. Transient passions, momentary interests, chance circumstances may give it the external forms of independence, but the despotism buried in the interior of the social body reappears sooner or later on the surface.

In order to make the reader understand well the general principles upon which the political organization of the township and the county in the United States rests, I have thought it useful to take one State in particular for a model, to examine in detail what happens there, and then to cast a rapid glance at the rest of the country.

I have chosen one of the States of New England.

The township and the county are not organized in the same manner in all parts of the Union; it is easy to recognize, however, that in all of the Union the same principles, more or less, presided over the formation of both of them.

Now, it appeared to me that in New England these principles received more considerable development and attained results that reached further than anywhere else. They therefore reveal themselves there, as it were, in greater relief and thus yield themselves more easily to the observation of the foreigner.

The municipal institutions of New England form a complete and regular whole; they are ancient; they are strong because of the laws, still more strong because of mores; they exercise a prodigious influence on the entire society.

For all of these reasons they deserve our attention.

The Limits of the Township

The township of New England occupies a middle ground between the canton and the municipality of France. It has, in general, two to three thousand inhabitants;1 it is therefore not so extensive that all the inhabitants do not have more or less the same interests, and, on the other hand, it is populous enough that one is always sure of finding within it the elements of a good administration.

Powers of the Township in New England [60]

The people is the origin of all powers in the township, as it is elsewhere.—It takes care of its principal affairs itself.—No municipal council.—The greatest part of municipal authority is concentrated in the hands of the Selectmen.—How the Selectmen act.—General assembly of the inhabitants of the township (Town-Meeting).—List of all the municipal officials.—Obligatory and remunerated offices.

The people is the source of social powers within the township just as it is everywhere else, but nowhere does it exercise its power more immediately. The people, in America, is a master that must be pleased up to the utmost possible limits.

In New England, the majority acts by means of representatives when it is necessary to deal with the general affairs of the State. It was necessary that this be so; but in the township where legislative and governmental action is closer to the governed, the law of representation is not accepted. There is no municipal council; the body of electors, after choosing its magistrates, directs them itself in everything that does not involve the pure and simple execution of the laws of the State.2

[61] This order of things is so contrary to our ideas, and so opposed to our habits, that some examples must be furnished here in order that it be well understood.

Public offices are very numerous and much divided within the township, as we will see below. However, the majority of administrative powers are concentrated in the hands of a small number of individuals who are elected annually and who are called Selectmen.3 The general laws of the State impose a certain number of obligations on the Selectmen. In order to fulfill them, they do not need the consent of those who come under their jurisdiction, and they cannot evade those obligations without being held personally responsible. State law charges them, for example, with composing the census of electors in their township; if they fail to do it, they make themselves guilty of an infraction of the law. But in everything that is left to the direction of the municipal power, the Selectmen are the executors of the popular will just as among us the mayor is the executor of the deliberations of the municipal council. Most of the time they act on their responsibility as individuals and merely see to it that, in practice, the principles previously laid down by the majority are faithfully adhered to. But if they want to introduce any change whatsoever in the established order, if they wish to engage in a new enterprise, they must go back to the source of their power. Assume it is a question of establishing a school; the Selectmen convoke on a certain day, at a place agreed upon in advance, the whole body of electors; there, they explain the need that has made itself felt; they make known the means of satifying it, the money that must be spent, the location it is advisable to choose. The assembly, consulted on all these points, adopts the principle, decides on the location, votes the tax, and hands the execution of its will over to the Selectmen.

Only the Selectmen have the right to convoke the town-meeting, but they may be made to do it. If ten proprietors conceive a new project and wish to present it for the assent of the township, they demand a general [62] convening of the inhabitants; the Selectmen are obligated to go along with it, and conserve only the right to preside over the assembly.4

These political mores, these social usages are without doubt far removed from our own. I do not at this time wish to judge them or make known the hidden causes which engender them and give them vitality. I limit myself to laying them out.

The Selectmen are elected annually in the month of April or May. The municipal assembly chooses at the same time a host of other municipal magistrates,5 who are placed in charge of certain important administrative details. Some, called assessors, have to set taxes; others, called collectors, have to collect them. An officer, called a constable, is charged with maintaining public order, watching over public places, and assisting in the physical execution of the laws. Another, called the municipal clerk, records all deliberations; he keeps the record of the proceedings of the registry office. A treasurer keeps the municipal funds. Add to these officers an overseer of the poor, whose duty, very hard to fulfill, is to see that the law relating to indigents is carried out; commissioners of schools, who oversee public education; inspectors of roads, who are responsible for all the details of large and small networks of roads, and you will have the list of the principal officials of the municipal administration. But the division of offices does not stop there: among the municipal officers,6 there are also parish commissioners, whose duty is to pay the expenses of worship; and inspectors of several sorts, some responsible for directing the citizens’ efforts in case of fire; others for overseeing the harvests; some for provisionally resolving difficulties that may arise regarding fencing; others for supervising the measurement of timber, or inspecting weights and measures.

In all, there are nineteen principal offices in the township. Every inhabitant is obliged, on pain of a fine, to accept these duties; but in addition the majority of those offices are subject to a remuneration, so that poor citizens can devote their time to them without suffering a loss from it. Furthermore, the American system does not give a fixed remuneration to officers. [63] In general, each act of their administration has a price, and they are remunerated only in proportion to what they have done.

The Township as an Individual Entityi

Each is the best judge of what regards only himself.—Corollary of the principle of the sovereignty of the people.—Application of these doctrines made by the American townships.—The New England township, sovereign in everything that relates only to itself, subject in all the rest.—Obligation of the township toward the State.—In France, the government lends its agents to the municipality.—In America, the township lends its agents to the government.

I have said previously that the principle of the sovereignty of the people hangs over the whole political system of the Anglo-Americans. Each page of this book will make known some new applications of this doctrine.

In nations where the dogma of the sovereignty of the people prevails, each individual forms an equal portion of the sovereign and participates equally in the government of the State.

Each individual is thus assumed to be as enlightened, as virtuous, as strong as any other of his fellow men.

Why then does he obey the society, and what are the natural limits of this obedience?

He obeys the society, not because he is inferior to those who direct it or less capable of governing himself than another man; he obeys society because union with his fellow men seems useful to him and because he knows that this union cannot exist without a controlling power.

In all that concerns the obligations of citizens to one another, he has thus become a subject. In all that regards only himself, he has remained master: he is free and must account for his actions only to God. From which comes this maxim, that the individual is the best as well as the sole judge of his particular interest and that society only has the right to direct his actions when it feels wronged by his act or when it has need to demand his help.

This doctrine is universally accepted in the United States. Elsewhere I will examine what general influence it exercises on the ordinary actions of life, but right now I am speaking about the townships.

The township, taken as a body and in relation to the central government, is only an individual like any other, to whom the theory which I [64] have just pointed out applies.

In the United States, municipal liberty thus flows from the very dogma of the sovereignty of the people. All the American republics have more or less recognized this independence, but among the peoples of New England, circumstances have particularly favored its development.

In this part of the Union, political life originated in the very bosom of the townships; one might almost say that at its origin each of them was an independent nation. When the kings of England later demanded their portion of sovereignty, they limited themselves to taking the central authority. They left the township in the state where they found it. Now the townships of New England are subjects; but in origin they were not so or were barely so. They therefore did not receive their powers; on the contrary, it was they who seem to have relinquished, in favor of the State, a portion of their independence; an important distinction, and one which must remain present in the mind of the reader.

The townships are in general subject to the State only when it is a question of an interest which I will call social, that is to say which they share with others.

For everything that relates only to them alone, the townships have remained independent bodies; and among the inhabitants of New England, there are none, I think, who recognize in the government of the State the right to intervene in the direction of purely municipal interests.

One thus sees the townships of New England sell and buy, bring actions and defend themselves in court, overload their budgets or lower taxes, without any administrative authority whatsoever thinking of opposing them.7

As for social obligations, the townships are obligated to satisfy them. Thus, if the State needs money, the township is not free to grant or refuse its contribution.8 If the State wants to open a road, the township is not free to close its territory to it. If it makes a regulation for maintaining public order, the township must execute it. If it wants to organize education according to a uniform plan throughout the country, the township is obligated to create the schools required by the law.9 We will see, when we discuss the administration of the United States, how and [65] by whom the townships, in all these different cases, are constrained to obedience. Here I only want to establish the existence of the obligation. This obligation is narrow, but the government of the State, in imposing it, only enacts a principle; for its execution, the township recovers in general all its rights as an individual. Thus, the tax, it is true, is voted by the legislature, but it is the township which allocates and collects it; the existence of a school is ordered, but it is the township which builds it, pays for it, and runs it.

In France, the tax inspector of the State collects municipal taxes; in America, the tax inspector of the township collects the State tax.

Thus, among us, the central government lends its agents to the township; in America, the township lends its officials to the government. That alone makes clear to what degree the two societies differ.

The Municipal Spirit in New England

Why the New England township attracts the affections of those who inhabit it.—The difficulty of creating municipal spirit that one encounters in Europe.—Municipal rights and duties contributing in America to the formation of this spirit.—The fatherland has more physiognomy in the United States than elsewhere.—In what the municipal spirit manifests itself in New England.—What happy effects it produces there.

In America, there are not only municipal institutions, but also a municipal spirit which supports them and invigorates them.

The township of New England combines two advantages which, everywhere they exist, keenly excite the interest of men; namely, independence and power. It acts, it is true, within an orbit that it cannot leave, but its movements there are free. This independence alone would already give it a real importance, which its population and its dimensions would not secure for it.

It cannot in the end be denied that the affections of men go in general only in the direction of power. One does not see love of the fatherland prevail for long in a conquered country. The inhabitant of New England is attached to his township, not so much because he was born there as because he sees in this township a free and strong corporate body of which he is a member, and which is worth the trouble one takes to run it.

It often happens, in Europe, that the governors themselves regret the [66] absence of municipal spirit; for everyone agrees that municipal spirit is a great element of public order and tranquility, but they don’t know how to produce it. By making the municipality strong and independent, they are afraid of splitting up social authority and exposing the State to anarchy. Now, take away power and independence from the municipality, and all you will ever find there are subjectsii and no citizens.

Notice, in addition, an important fact: the New England township is so constituted as to be able to serve as a center of lively affections, and at the same time there is nothing close by it that strongly attracts the ambitious passions of the human heart.

The county officials are not elected, and their authority is limited. The State itself has only a secondary importance; its existence is obscure and quiet. There are few men who, in order to gain the right to administer it, agree to go away from the center of their interests and disrupt their lives.

The Federal government confers power and glory upon those who direct it, but the men to whom it is given to influence its future are very few in number. The Presidency is a high office that one succeeds in reaching almost exclusively later in life; and when one arrives at other Federal offices of a high rank, it is in a way by chance and after one has already become famous by following another career. Ambition cannot take them for the permanent goal of its efforts. It is in the township, at the center of the ordinary relations of life, that are concentrated the desire for esteem, the need born of real interests, the taste for power and éclat;iii these passions, which so often disturb society, change character when they can be thus exercised close to hearth and home and in a way in the bosom of the family.

See with what art, in the American township, care has been taken, if I can thus express myself, to disperse power, in order to interest more people in public things. Independently of the electors called from time to time to act as the government, how many different offices there are, how many different magistrates, all of whom, within the limits of their jurisdictions, represent the powerful corporate body in whose name they act! How many men in this way make use of municipal power to their own benefit and interest themselves in it for their own sakes!

The American system, at the same time that it breaks up municipal power among a great number of citizens, also does not fear to multiply municipal obligations. [67] In the United States it is thought with reason that love of the fatherland is a species of religion to which men attach themselves through practice.

In this manner, municipal life in a way makes itself felt at each moment; it manifests itself each day by the accomplishment of a duty or the exercise of a right. This political life imparts a movement to the society that is continual but at the same time peaceful, that stirs it up without disrupting it.

The Americans are attached to the town for a reason analogous to that which makes the inhabitants of the mountains love their country. Among them the fatherland has marked and characteristic traits; it has more physiognomy than elsewhere.

The New England townships have in general a happy existence. Their government is to their taste as well as of their choice. In the bosom of the profound peace and material prosperity that prevails in America, the storms of municipal life are few in number. The management of municipal interests is easy. Moreover, the political education of the people was accomplished long ago, or rather they arrived completely educated on the soil that they occupy. In New England, the division of ranks does not even exist in memory; there is therefore no part of the township that is tempted to oppress the other, and injustices, which strike only isolated individuals, are lost in the general contentment. If the government exhibits defects, and it is certainly easy to point some out, they do not attract attention, because the government really emanates from the governed and because it is enough that it work more or less well in order for a sort of paternal pride to protect it. Besides, they have nothing else with which to compare it. England formerly reigned over all the colonies, but the people always directed municipal affairs. The sovereignty of the people in the township is therefore not only an ancient state, but a primordial state.

The inhabitant of New England is attached to his township because it is strong and independent; he takes an interest in it because he actively participates in running it; he loves it because he has no reason to complain about his lot in it; he invests in it his ambition and his future; he participates in each of the events of municipal life: in this limited sphere that is within his reach, he tries his hand at governing the society; he habituates himself to the forms without which liberty only progresses by revolutions, is penetrated by their spirit, acquires a taste for order, understands the harmony of the different powers, and, finally, gathers together clear and practical ideas on the nature of his obligations as well as on the extent of his rights.

• • •

On the Political Effects of Administrative [86]

Decentralization in the United States

Distinction to be established between governmental centralization and administrative centralization.—In the United States, no administrative centralization, but very great governmental centralization.—Some unfortunate effects which result in the United States from extreme administrative decentralization.—Administrative advantages of this order of things.—The force which administers the society is less well ordered, less enlightened, less learned, and much greater than in Europe.—Political advantages of this same order of things.—In the United States, the fatherland makes itself felt everywhere.—Support that the governed lend to the government.—Provincial institutions more necessary to the extent that the social state becomes more democratic.—Why.

Centralization is a word that is repeated incessantly in our day and whose meaning nobody, in general, seeks to state precisely.

There exist, however, two kinds of centralization that are very different [87] and that it is important to know well.

Certain interests are common to all the parts of the nation, such as the formation of general laws and the relations of the people with foreigners.

Other interests are specific to certain parts of the nation, such as, for example, municipal undertakings.

To concentrate in the same place or in the same hands the power to govern the former is to establish what I will call governmental centralization.

To concentrate in the same manner the power to govern the latter is to establish what I will call administrative centralization.

There are points at which these two kinds of centralization merge with one another. But by taking as a whole the objects that fall most particularly within the domain of each of them, one easily succeeds in distinguishing them.

Governmental centralization understandably acquires an immense force when it is joined to administrative centralization. In this manner it habituates men to make a complete and continual abstraction of their will; to obey, not one time and on one point, but in everything and every day. Then not only does it dominate them by force, but even more, it takes hold of them through their habits; it isolates them and then seizes them one by one in the common mass.

These two kinds of centralization lend each other a mutual help; they are drawn to one another, but I cannot believe that they are inseparable.

Under Louis XIV, France witnessed the greatest governmental centralization that one can conceive, since the same man made general laws and had the power to interpret them, represented France to the outside world, and acted in its name. The State, it is I,iv he used to say, and he was right.

However, under Louis XIV, there was much less administrative centralization than in our day.

In our time, we see a power, England, in which governmental centralization is carried to a very high degree: the State seems to move there as a single man; it raises immense masses at will and combines and carries all the force of its power anywhere it wishes.

England, which has accomplished such great things for the last fifty years, does not have administrative centralization. For my part, I cannot conceive that a nation can live nor above all prosper without strong governmental centralization.

But I think that administrative centralization [88] is only good for enervating the peoples who submit themselves to it because it tends unceasingly to diminish civic spirit among them. Administrative centralization succeeds, it is true, in combining at a given time, and in a certain place, all the available forces of the nation, but it compromises the continued reproduction of those forces. It makes the nation triumph on the day of combat and diminishes its power in the long run. It can therefore contribute admirably to the passing greatness of a man, but not to the lasting prosperity of a people.

• • • [90]

The partisans of centralization in Europe claim that governmental power administers the local communities better than they can administer themselves: that may be true when the central power is enlightened and the local communities are without enlightenment, when it is active and they are lethargic, when it has the habit of acting and they have the habit of obeying. One even understands that the more centralization increases, the more this double tendency grows and the more the capacity of one part and the incapacity of the other become salient.

But I deny that it is so when the people is enlightened, awakened to its interests, and habituated to think about them as it does in America.

I am persuaded, on the contrary, that in this case the collective strength of the citizens will always be more powerful for producing social well-being than the authority of government.

I admit that it is difficult to indicate with certainty the means of awakening a people that is sleeping in order to give it the passions and enlightenment that it does not have. To persuade men that they must take responsibility for their affairs is, I am not unaware, an arduous undertaking. [91] It would often be less difficult to interest them in the details of the etiquette of a court than in the repair of their common dwelling.

But I also think that when the central administration claims to replace completely the free, active participation of the persons primarily interested, it deceives itself or wishes to deceive you.

A central power, however enlightened, however competent one imagines it to be, cannot embrace within itself alone all the details of the life of a great people. It cannot do it because such a task exceeds human powers. When it wishes, through its own efforts, to create and make function so many diverse forces, it contents itself with a very incomplete result or exhausts itself in futile efforts.

Centralization succeeds easily, it is true, in subjecting the external actions of man to a certain uniformity that one ends up loving for its own sake, independently of the things to which it is applied, like those devout believers who adore the statue, forgetting the divinity that it represents. Centralization succeeds easily in giving a regular look to everyday affairs; in ruling skillfullyv over the details of social order; in suppressing light disorders and small infractions; in maintaining the society in a status quo which is not strictly either decadence or progress; in maintaining in the social body a sort of administrative somnolence that the administrators are accustomed to call good order and public tranquility.50 It excels, in a word, in preventing, not in doing. When it is a question of profoundly stirring the society or imparting a rapid movement to it, its strength abandons it. If its measures ever have need of the active support of individuals, one is then quite surprised by the weakness of this immense machine; it finds itself suddenly reduced to impotence.

It happens sometimes that centralization tries, in desperation, to call the citizens to its aid, but it says to them: You will act as I wish, as much as I wish, and precisely in the direction that I wish. You will take care of these details without aspiring to direct the whole; you will labor in the shadows, and you will judge my work later by its results. It is not in such [92] conditions that one obtains the active support of the human will. It must have liberty in the way it comports itself and responsibility in its actions. Man is so constructed that he prefers to remain immobile than to march without independence toward a goal of which he knows nothing.

I will not deny that in the United States one often regrets not finding those uniform rules that seem constantly to watch over each of us.

One encounters there from time to time great examples of lack of care and of social negligence. From time to time gross blemishes appear that seem to be in complete conflict with the surrounding civilization.

Useful undertakings that demand continual effort and a rigorous exactness in order to succeed often end up being abandoned because, in America as elsewhere, the people proceeds by short-lived efforts and sudden impulses.

The European, accustomed to finding continually at his hand an official who meddles in nearly everything, has difficulty getting used to the different mechanism of municipal administration. In general, one can say that the small details of social order which make life smooth and commodious are neglected in America, but the guarantees essential to man in society exist there as much as anywhere else. Among the Americans, the force that administers the State is less well ordered, less enlightened, less learned, but a hundred times greater than in Europe. There is no country in the world where men make, in the final analysis, as many efforts in order to create social well-being. I know no people who has succeeded in establishing schools as numerous and as effective; churches that have more rapport with the religious needs of the inhabitants; better maintained municipal roads. One must not therefore seek in the United States uniformity and permanence of views, meticulous care for details, perfection of administrative procedures;51 what one finds there is the picture of [53] strength, a bit untamed it is true, but full of power; and of life, accompanied by mishaps but also by movements and efforts.

I will admit besides, if one wishes, that the villages and counties of the United States would be more usefully administered by a central authority located far from them, and which would remain foreign to them, than by officials chosen from within them. I will acknowledge, if one demands it, that there would be more security in America, that one would make wiser and more judicious use there of social resources, if the administration of the whole country were concentrated in a single hand. The political advantages that the Americans obtain from the system of decentralization would still make me prefer it to the opposite system.

Of what matter is it to me, after all, that there is an authority always active, which sees to it that my pleasures are tranquil, which flies ahead of me to turn aside all dangers, without my even needing to think about it; if this authority, at the same time that it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is the absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes movement and life to the point that everything around it must languish when it languishes, that everything sleeps when it sleeps, that everything perishes when it dies?vi

There are nations like this in Europe, where the inhabitant considers himself as a kind of tenant farmer indifferent to the fate of the place where he lives. The greatest changes occur in his country without his participation;vii he does not even know exactly what has occurred; he suspects; he has heard tell of the event by accident. Much more, the fate of his village, the security of his street, the future of his church and of his presbytery do not touch him at all; he thinks that all these things have nothing to do in any way with him, and that they belong to a powerful stranger called the government. For his part, he enjoys his possessions like a usufructuary,viii without a spirit of ownership and without any ideas whatsoever of improving them. This indifference to himself goes so far that if his own safety or that of his children is finally endangered, instead of taking the responsibility to remove the danger, he crosses his arms in order to wait for the entire nation to come to his aid. [94] This man, besides, although he has made such a complete sacrifice of his free will, does not like obedience more than the next man. He submits, it is true, to the wishes of a clerk, but he takes pleasure in defying the law like a vanquished enemy as soon as force is withdrawn. Therefore, one sees him oscillate incessantly between servitude and license.

When nations have arrived at this point, they must either modify their laws and mores or perish, because the source of public virtues there has run dry: one still finds subjects there, but one no longer sees citizens.

I say that such nations are ready for conquest. If they do not disappear from the world’s stage, it is because they are surrounded by nations similar or inferior to them; it is because there still remains in their bosom a sort of indefinable instinct of patriotism, and who knows what unreflective pride in the name the fatherland bears, what vague memory of past glory, which, without being precisely connected to anything, suffices for imparting to them a conserving impulse if the need arises.

It would be a mistake to reassure oneself with the thought that certain peoples have made prodigious efforts to defend a fatherland in which they lived virtually as foreigners. Pay very close attention to it, and one will see that religion was then almost always their principal motive.

The longevity, the glory, or the prosperity of the nation had become for them sacred dogmas, and in defending their fatherland, they were also defending that holy city in which they were all citizens.

The Turkish people has never taken any part in the direction of the affairs of the society; they have, however, accomplished immense undertakings, as long as they saw the triumph of the religion of Mohammed in the conquests of the sultans. Today the religion is disappearing; despotism alone remains: they are declining.

Montesquieu, by granting to despotism a strength that was its own, did it, I think, an honor that it did not merit. Despotism, by itself alone, cannot sustain anything lasting. When one looks at it from close up, one perceives that it is religion and not fear that has made absolute governments prosper for a long time.

No matter what one does, one will never find genuine power among men except in the free convergence and collaboration of wills. Now, there is nothing in the world except patriotism or religion that can make the whole of the citizenry march toward a single goal over a long period of time.

The laws cannot revive beliefs which are dying out, but the laws can interest men in the destiny of their country. The laws can reawaken and [95] direct that vague instinct of patriotism which never abandons the heart of man, and, by connecting it to the ideas, passions, and habits of his everyday life, make of it a reflective and durable sentiment. And let it not be said that it is too late to try it; nations do not age in the same manner as men. Each generation which is born within them is like a new people which comes to offer itself to the hand of the legislator.

What I admire most in America, are not the administrative effects of decentralization but the political effects. In the United States, the fatherland makes itself felt everywhere. It is an object of solicitude from the village to the entire Union. The inhabitant is attached to each of the interests of his country as to his very own. He glories in the nation’s glory; in the success that it obtains, he believes he recognizes his own work, [95] and he is uplifted by it; he rejoices in the general prosperity from which he profits. He has for his fatherland a sentiment analogous to that which one feels for one’s family, and it is again through a kind of egoism that he interests himself in the State.

Often the European sees in the public official only force; the American sees, in him, right. One may therefore say that in America, man never obeys man but justice or law.

And so he has conceived an opinion of himself that is often exaggerated but almost always salutary. He trusts without fear in his own powers, which appear to him sufficient for everything. A private man conceives the idea of some undertaking or other; were this undertaking to have a direct relation to the well-being of society, the idea never occurs to him to address the public authority in order to obtain its aid. He makes his plan known, offers himself to execute it, calls the strength of other individuals to the aid of his own, and struggles hand to hand against all obstacles. Often, without doubt, he succeeds less well than the State would in his place; but in the long run the general result of all the individual undertakings surpasses by far what the government would be able to do.

Since the administrative authority is placed at the side of those who are subject to it, and in a way represents them through themselves, it arouses neither jealousy nor hatred. Since its means are limited, each feels that he cannot rely solely upon it.

When, therefore, the administrative authority intervenes within the limit of its jurisdiction, it does not find itself abandoned to itself as in Europe. It is not thought that the duties of private persons have ceased because the representative of the public arrives to take action. Each, on the contrary, gives him guidance, helps him, and supports him.

[96] The action of the individual forces is joined to the action of the social forces, and from this one often succeeds in doing what would be beyond the power of the most concentrated and most energetic administration to accomplish.

• • •

_____________

1. The number of townships, in the State of Massachusetts, was, in 1830, 305; the number of inhabitants 610,014; which gives an average of around 2,000 inhabitants per township.

2. The same rules do not apply to large municipalities. Those have in general a mayor and a municipal body divided into two branches; but that is an exception which must be authorized by a law. See the law of 22 February 1822, regulating the powers of the town of Boston. Laws of Massachusetts, Vol. II, p. 588. This applies to the large towns. It also often occurs that small towns are subject to a particular administration. In 1832 in the State of New York there were 104 municipalities administered in this way. (William’s-Register.)

3. Three of them are elected in the smallest municipalities, and nine in the largest. See The Town Officer, p. 186. See also the principal laws of Massachusetts relating to the Selectmen:

Law of 20 February 1786, Vol. 1, p. 219;—of 24 February 1786, Vol. 1, p. 488;—7 March 1801, Vol. II, p. 45;—16 June 1795, Vol. I, p. 475;—12 March 1808, Vol. II, p. 186;—28 February 1787, Vol. I, p. 302;—22 June 1797, Vol. I, p. 539.

4. See Laws of Massachusetts, Vol. I, p. 150; law of 25 March 1786.

5. Ibid.

6. All these magistrates really exist in practice.

To acquaint oneself with the details of the duties of all these municipal magistrates, see Isaac Goodwin, Town Officer, Worcester 1827, and the collection of the general laws of Massachusetts in 3 Volumes, Boston 1823.

7. See Laws of Massachusetts, law of 23 March 1786, vol. 1, p. 250.

8. Ibid., law of 20 February 1786, vol. 1, p. 217.

9. See the same collection, law of 25 June 1789, and 8 March 1827, vol. 1, p. 367, and vol. III, p. 179.

50. China appears to me to offer the most perfect symbol of the type of social well-being that a very centralized administration can give to the peoples who submit themselves to it. Travelers tell us that the Chinese have tranquility without happiness, industry without progress, stability without force, and material order without public morality. There, society always functions rather well, never very well. I imagine that when China is opened to Europeans, they will find there the most beautiful model of centralized administration that exists in the world.

51. A writer of talent who, in a comparison between the finances of the United States and those of France, has proved that intelligence cannot always compensate for lack of knowledge of the facts, reproaches the Americans with reason for the sort of confusion that prevails in their municipal budgets, and, after having given the model of a departmental budget in France, he adds: “Thanks to centralization, the admirable creation of a great man, municipal budgets, from one end of the kingdom to the other, those of great cities as well as those of the most humble municipalities, do not present less order and method.” There, certainly, is a result I admire; but I see most of these French municipalities, whose accounts are so perfect, plunged into a profound ignorance of their true interests and given up to an apathy so invincible that society there seems rather to vegetate than to live; on the other hand, I perceive in these same American municipalities, whose budgets are not drawn up according to methodical plans nor above all uniform ones, a population enlightened, active, and enterprising; there I look upon a society always at work. This spectacle astonishes me; for in my opinion the principal goal of a good government is to produce the well-being of peoples and not to establish a certain order in the midst of their misery. I wonder therefore if it would not be possible to attribute to the same cause the prosperity of the American municipality and the apparent disorder of its finances, the distress of the municipality in France and the perfecting of its budget. In any case, I distrust a good that I find mixed up with so many evils, and I can easily accept an evil which is compensated by so much good.

i De l’Existence Communale. The usual translation of De l’Existence Communale would be “Township Existence” or “Township Life.” However, Tocqueville’s text here is not about the daily life or the physical existence of the township, but about its status as, in Tocqueville’s words, “an individual like any other” vis à vis the State. This accords with a less common meaning of the word existence: an existing individual or entity.

ii The word translated as “subjects” is administrés: literally, “the administered,” persons subject to an administrative authority. See at Vol. 1, Part 1, Chap. 5 [94], the similar formulation: on y trouve encore des sujets, mais on n’y vois plus de citoyens: “one still finds subjects there, but one no longer sees citizens.”

iii The word translated as “éclat” is bruit. Bruit in this context refers to the brilliance, impact, or notoriety in the world of one’s deeds, position, or qualities. Éclat entered English usage from the French, where it is a synonym for bruit. To make a bruit or an éclat means to cause a sensation, a stir, or even a scandal.

iv L’Etat, c’est moi.

v The words translated as “ruling skillfully” are régenter savamment. This is sharp irony: régenter means to govern with excessive or unjustified authority; and savamment means “skillfully” in the sense of “cleverly” or “cunningly.”

vi This passage would have reminded Tocqueville’s French readers of the La Fontaine fable The Wolf and the Dog: the wolf, who is free but starving, is momentarily attracted to the life of the dog, who is well fed by his masters, but he runs away as soon as he grasps the meaning of the dog’s collar.

vii The word translated as “participation” is concours. This word must not be translated in a way that implies simply the concurrence or consent of the governed in the actions of government. Tocqueville uses concours with great frequency in this section of Chapter 5, and it reflects his argument that liberty requires more than consent. Precisely consent alone, without more, gives the appearance of liberty to the“soft despotism” which makes life thorn-free at the price of real freedom. The latter requires the free, active participation or collaboration—the concours libre—of the citizens in their own government. See above all Tocqueville’s argument in Vol. 2, Part 4, Chap. 6 [325–6].

viii A person possessing a usufruct, which is a right to use something without any right of ownership.

The Tyranny of the Majority

How the principle of the sovereignty of the people must be understood.—Impossibility of conceiving of a mixed government.—Sovereign power must exist somewhere.—Preventive measures that must be taken to moderate its action.—These measures were not taken in the United States.—What results from this.

I regard as impious and detestable the maxim that in matters of government the majority of a people has the right to do everything, and nevertheless I place the origin of all powers in the wishes of the majority. Am I in contradiction with myself?

There exists a general law which has been made, or at least adopted, not only by the majority of this or that people but by the majority of all men. This law is justice.

Justice thus forms the limit to the right of each people.

A nation is like a jury charged with representing universal society and applying justice, which is its law. Must the jury, which represents [262] society, have more power than the society itself whose laws it applies?

When, therefore, I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not deny to the majority the right to command; I am only appealing from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of mankind.

There are men who do not fear to say that a people, with respect to the matters that interest only itself, cannot entirely go beyond the limits of justice and reason and that therefore one should not fear giving all power to the majority which represents it. But that is the language of slaves.

What therefore is a majority, taken collectively, except an individual who has opinions and most often interests contrary to another individual whom one calls the minority? Now, if you admit that a man invested with absolute power may abuse it against his adversaries, why do you not admit the same thing for a majority? Have men, by being brought together, changed character? Have they become more patient before obstacles in becoming stronger?3 For myself, I cannot believe it, and the power to do everything, which I refuse to a single one of my fellow men, I will never grant to several.

It is not that, in order to conserve liberty, I believe that one can mix several principles in the same government in such a manner that they are really opposed to one another.

What is called mixed government has always seemed to me a chimera. In truth, mixed government (in the sense that is given to this word) does not exist, because in each society one ends up finding a principle of action which dominates all the others.

England in the last century, which has been particularly cited as an example of this sort of government, was essentially an aristocratic state, although large elements of democracy existed within it, because the laws and mores were ordered in such a way that, in the long run, aristocracy would always prevail and manage public affairs as it wished.

The error is due to the fact that, constantly seeing the interests of the great in battle with those of the people, one only thought about the struggle instead of paying attention to the result of this struggle, which [263] was the important point. When a society comes to really have a mixed government, that is to say equally divided between contrary principles, it has a revolution, or it breaks up.

I think, therefore, that a social power superior to all the others must always be placed somewhere, but I think liberty in danger when this power finds no obstacle before it which can check its march and give it the time to moderate itself on its own.

Absolute power seems to me in itself a bad and dangerous thing. Its exercise appears to me to be beyond the powers of man, no matter who he is, and I see only God who can be all-powerful without danger, because his wisdom and justice are always equal to His power. There is therefore no authority on earth so respectable in itself, or invested with a right so sacred, that I wish to let it act without control and to dominate without obstacles. Therefore, the moment I see the right and the capability to do everything granted to any power whatsoever, whether one calls it people or king, democracy or aristocracy, whether it is exercised in a monarchy or in a democracy, I say: there is the germ of tyranny, and I try to go live under other laws.

What I reproach the most in democratic government, as it has been organized in the United States, is not, as many men claim in Europe, its weakness, but on the contrary its irresistible force. And what I find most repugnant in America is not the extreme liberty which prevails there; it is the little guarantee against tyranny which one finds there.

When a man or party suffers from an injustice in the United States, to whom do you want him to appeal? To public opinion? It is that which forms the majority. To the legislative body? It represents the majority and obeys it blindly. To the executive power? It is chosen by the majority and serves as its passive instrument. To public force? The public force is nothing other than the majority under arms. To the jury? The jury is the majority invested with the right to pronounce sentence: the judges themselves, in certain states, are elected by the majority. However unjust or irrational the measure which strikes you, you must therefore submit to it.4

Suppose, on the contrary, a legislative body composed in such a way [264] that it represents the majority without being necessarily the slave of its passions, an executive power possessed of a strength which is its own, and a judicial power independent of the two other powers; you will still have a democratic government, but there will be almost no chance any longer of tyranny.

I am not saying that in the present time in America tyranny occurs frequently; I am saying that there is no guarantee there against it and that the causes of the mildness of government there must be sought in the circumstances and in the mores rather than in the laws.

Effects of the Omnipotence of the Majority on

the Arbitrary Power of American Public Officials

Liberty that the law allows to American officials within the limits it has marked out.—Their power.

It is necessary to distinguish well between arbitrary power and tyranny. Tyranny may be exercised by means of the law itself, and then it is not arbitrary; arbitrary power may be exercised in the interest of the governed, and then it is not tyrannical.

Tyranny usually makes use of arbitrary power, but if necessary it knows how to do without it.

In the United States, the omnipotence of the majority, [265] at the same time that it facilitates the legal despotism of the legislature, also facilitates the arbitrary power of the magistrate. The majority, being absolute master of the making of law and of the supervision of its execution, having an equal control over the governors and the governed, regards public officials as its passive agents and willingly relies on them for the task of carrying out its intentions. It therefore does not go into the detail of their duties in advance and barely takes the trouble to define their rights. It treats them as a master might treat his servants if, seeing them act at all times under his eyes, he could direct or correct their conduct at each moment.

In general, the law leaves American officials much freer than ours within the limits it has marked out for them. Sometimes it even happens that the majority allows them to go beyond those limits. Backed by the opinion of the majority and confident of its support, they then dare things that astonish even a European accustomed to the sight of arbitrary power. Habits are thus formed in the bosom of liberty that may become disastrous for it.

The Power That the Majority in

America Exercises over Thought

In the United States, when the majority is irrevocably fixed on any question, there is no more debate.—Why.—Moral power that the majority exercises over thought.—Democratic republics spiritualize despotism.ii

When one comes to examine the exercise of thought in the United States, it is then that one sees very clearly to what extent the power of the majority surpasses all the powers that we know in Europe.

Thought is an invisible power, and one almost impossible to seize hold of,iii which mocks all tyrannies. In our day, the most absolute sovereigns of Europe cannot prevent certain thoughts hostile to their authority from circulating silently in their States and even in the heart of their courts. It is not the same in America: to the extent that the majority is in doubt, one speaks; but as soon as it has irrevocably decided, each one falls silent, and friends as well as enemies seem then to attach themselves together to its chariot. The reason for this is simple: there is no monarch so absolute that he can unite in his hands all the forces of society and vanquish resistance, as a majority can when it is invested with [266] the right to make the laws and to execute them.

In addition, a king has only a material power which acts upon behavior and cannot reach wills, but the majority is invested with a force at once material and moral which acts upon the will as much as upon actions and which prevents at one and the same time the act and the desire to act.

I know of no country where there prevails, in general, less independence of mind and less true freedom of discussion than in America.

There is no religious or political theory which cannot be preached freely in the constitutional States of Europe and which does not penetrate the others; for there is no country in Europe so subject to a single power that he who wishes to speak the truth there cannot find some support in it capable of securing him against the consequences of his independence. If he has the misfortune to live under an absolute government, he often has the people on his side; if he lives in a free country, he can take refuge if necessary behind the royal power. The aristocratic fraction of the society supports him in democratic countries, and the democratic fraction does so in the others. But in an organized democracy like that of the United States, there is only a single power, a single element of strength and success, and nothing outside of it.

In America, the majority draws a formidable ring around thought. Within these limits, the writer is free; but woe to him if he dares to go outside of it. It is not that he has to fear being burnt at the stake, but he is exposed to all kinds of execrations and daily persecutions. A political career is closed to him: he has offended the only power which has the capability of opening it up to him. Everything is refused to him, even glory.

Before publishing his opinions, he believed that he had partisans; it seems to him that he no longer has any now that he has opened himself up to everyone, because those who condemn him express themselves loudly, and those who think like him, without having his courage, fall silent and withdraw. He gives in, he bows in the end beneath the effort of each day, and he becomes silent again, as if he felt remorse at having told the truth.

Chains and executioners: those are the crude instruments which tyranny formerly employed, but in our day civilization has perfected even despotism itself, which seemed to have nothing more to learn.

The princes had, so to speak, materialized violence; the democratic republics of our day have made it as intellectual as the human will that it wishes to constrain. Under the absolute government of a single man, despotism, in order to reach the soul, crudely strikes the body, and the soul, [267] escaping these blows, rises gloriously above it, but in the democratic republics, tyranny does not proceed in this way; it leaves the body alone and goes straight to the soul. The master no longer says to it: “You will think like me, or you will die;” he says: “You are free to not think like me; your life, your property, all stays with you; but from this day you are a stranger among us. You will keep your political rights, but they will be useless to you; because if you seek the vote of your fellow citizens, they will not give it to you, and if you demand only their esteem, they will still feign refusing it to you.iv You will remain among men, but you will lose your rights to humanity. When you approach your fellow men, they will avoid you like an impure being; and those who believe in your innocence, those very same ones will abandon you, because they would be avoided in their turn. Go in peace, I leave you your life, but I leave it to you in a condition worse than death.”

The absolute monarchies brought despotism into disrepute; let us take care that the democratic republics do not rehabilitate it and that in making it more oppressive for some, they do not take away from it, in the eyes of the majority, its odious appearance and degrading character. In the proudest nations of the Old World, works were published which were intended to depict faithfully the vices and absurdities of contemporaries; La Bruyère was living in the palace of Louis XIV when he composed his chapter on the great, and Molière criticized the court in plays he arranged to have performed before the courtiers.v But the power that holds sway in the United States does not intend to be made a fool of in this way. The slightest reproach offends it, the smallest of stinging truths shocks it; it must be praised, from the forms of its language to its most solid virtues. No writer, no matter what his renown, can escape this obligation to shower praise upon his fellow citizens. The majority thus lives amid a perpetual adoration of itself; only foreigners or experience can make certain truths reach the ears of the Americans.

If America does not yet have great writers, we need not look for the reasons elsewhere: literary genius does not exist without freedom of mind, and there is no freedom of mind in America.

The Inquisition was never able to prevent the circulation in Spain of books contrary to the religion of the majority. The empire of the majority does better in the United States: it has removed even the thought of publishing them. One meets unbelievers in America, but unbelief has virtually no voice there.

One sees governments which try hard to protect morals by condemning the authors of licentious books. In the United States, no one is condemned [268] for these sorts of works, but no one is tempted to write them. It is not, however, that all citizens have pure morals, but the majority is regular in its own.

Here, the use of power is without doubt good: but I was only speaking of the power in itself. This irresistible power is a constant fact, and its good use is only an accident.

Effects of the Tyranny of the Majority on the National Character

of the Americans; The Courtier Spirit in the United States

The effects of the tyranny of the majority have been felt up to now more in the mores than in the conduct of the society.—They arrest the growth of great characters.—Democratic republics organized like those of the United States place the courtier spirit within reach of a great many.—Evidence of this spirit in the United States.—Why there is more patriotism in the people than in those who govern in its name.

The influence of what I have just discussed still makes itself felt only weakly in the political society, but one already notices its unfortunate effects upon the national character of the Americans. I think that the small number of outstanding men that are visible today on the political scene must be attributed above all to the continually increasing influence of the despotism of the majority in the United States.

When the American Revolution broke out, a crowd of them appeared; public opinion at that time guided the wills of men but did not tyrannize them. The famous men of that time, while freely taking part in the movement of ideas, had a grandeur that was their own: they spread their brilliance over the nation and did not borrow from it.

In absolute governments, the great men who are close to the throne flatter the passions of the master and bend themselves readily to his caprices. But the mass of the nation does not lend itself to servitude; it submits often out of weakness, out of habit, or out of ignorance; sometimes out of love of royalty or of the king. Some peoples have invested a sort of pleasure and pride in the sacrifice of their will to that of the prince and have thus placed a kind of independence of soul in the very midst of obedience. Among these peoples, there is much less degradation than misery [269]. There is, in addition, a great difference between doing what one does not approve of and feigning to approve of what one does: the former belongs to a weak man, but the latter belongs only to the habits of a valet.

In free countries, where each is more or less called to give his opinion on the affairs of State; in democratic republics, where public life is constantly mixed with private life, where the sovereign is approachable from all sides, and where one only needs to raise one’s voice in order to reach its ear, there are many more men who seek to speculate on its weaknesses and to make their living at the expense of its passions than in absolute monarchies. It is not that men there are naturally worse than elsewhere, but the temptation there is at the same time stronger and open to more men. There results from this a much more general abasement in men’s souls.

Democratic republics place the courtier spirit within reach of a great number and cause it to penetrate all the classes at the same time. This is one of the principal reproaches which one can make against them.

That is above all true in democratic States organized like the American republics, where the majority possesses an empire so absolute and so irresistible that it is necessary in a way to renounce one’s rights as a citizen, and, so to speak, one’s standing as a man, when one wishes to deviate from the path which the majority has marked out.

Among the immense crowd which in the United States rushes into the career of politics, I have seen very few men who exhibit the virile candor, the manly independence of thought, which often distinguished the Americans in former times, and which, everywhere where it is found, forms the outstanding trait of great characters. One would think at first glance that in America minds were all formed on the same model, so much do they follow exactly the same paths. The foreigner, it is true, sometimes meets Americans who deviate from the rigor of the accepted formulas; sometimes they deplore the defect of the laws, the fickleness of democracy, and its lack of enlightenment; often they even notice the defects which corrupt the national character, and they point out the measures which one could take in order to correct them; but no one, except you, listens to them; and you, to whom they confide these secret thoughts, you are only a foreigner, and you are passing through. They readily reveal truths to you which are useless to you, and, when they go down into the public square, they use a different language.

If these lines ever reach America, I am certain of two things: first, that all readers will raise their voice to condemn me; second, that many of them will absolve me in the depths of their conscience.

I have heard men speak of the fatherland in the United States. I have [270] found true patriotism in the people; I have often looked for it in vain in those who govern them. This is easily understood by analogy: despotism corrupts much more he who submits to it than he who imposes it. In absolute monarchies, the king often has great virtues, but the courtiers are always base.

It is true that courtiers in America do not say: “Sire” and “Your Majesty,” as if this were a great and capital difference, but they speak incessantly of the natural enlightenment of their master; they do not put to the test the question of knowing which of the prince’s virtues is most worthy of admiration because they guarantee that he possesses all the virtues without having acquired them and, so to speak, without wishing to do so; they do not give him their wives and their daughters in order that he deign to raise them to the rank of his mistresses, but, by sacrificing their opinions to him, they prostitute themselves.

The moralists and the philosophers in America are not obliged to wrap their opinions in the veils of allegory, but, before hazarding a disagreeable truth, they say: “We know that we are speaking to a people too far above human weaknesses not to remain always master of itself. We would not express ourselves in this way, if we were not addressing men whose virtues and enlightenment make them alone, among all others, worthy of remaining free.”

How could the flatterers of Louis XIV have done better?

For myself, I believe that in all governments, no matter what they are, baseness will become attached to force, and flattery to power. And I know only one way of preventing men from becoming degraded: that is to grant to no one, along with absolute power, the sovereign power to debase them.

The Greatest Danger to the American Republics

Comes from the Omnipotence of the Majority

It is by the bad use of their power, and not by impotence, that democratic republics are imperiled.—The government of the American republics more centralized and more energetic than the monarchies of Europe.—The danger which results from this.—Opinions of Madison and Jefferson on this subject.

Governments ordinarily perish from impotence or from tyranny. In the first case, power escapes them; in the other, it is forcibly taken from them.

[271] Many men, seeing democratic States fall into a state of anarchy, have thought that the government in these States was naturally weak and impotent. The truth is that, once war breaks out between the parties there, the government loses its influence over the society. But I do not think that it is the nature of a democratic power to lack strength and resources; I believe, on the contrary, that it is almost always the abuse of its powers and the bad use of its resources which imperil it. Anarchy arises almost always from its tyranny or from its incapacity, but not from its impotence.

One must not confuse stability with strength or the grandeur of a thing with its longevity. In democratic republics, the power which directs5 the society is not stable, because it often changes hands and aim. But everywhere it is brought to bear, its force is almost irresistible.

The government of the American republics appears to me to be as centralized and more energetic than that of the absolute monarchies of Europe. I do not think that it will perish from weakness.6

If liberty is ever lost in America, the blame will have to be placed on the omnipotence of the majority which will have brought the minorities to the point of despair and constrained them to make an appeal to physical force. Then one will see anarchy, but it will occur as a consequence of despotism.

President James Madison expressed the same thoughts. (See The Federalist, N° 51.)

“It is of great importance in republics,” he said, “not only to defend the society against the oppression of those who govern it, but also to safeguard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Justice is the end to which any government must aspire; this is the end which men intend by uniting with one another. Peoples have made and will always make efforts toward this end, until they have succeeded in attaining it, or they have lost their liberty.

“If there existed a society in which the most powerful party was able to easily unite its forces and oppress the weakest, one could conclude that anarchy prevails in such a society just as it does in the state of nature, where the weakest individual has no guarantee against the violence of the strongest; and just as in the state of nature the disadvantages of an [272] uncertain and precarious fate persuade the strongest to submit to a government which protects the weak as well as themselves, in an anarchic government the same motives will lead the strongest parties gradually to wish for a government which can protect equally all parties, the strong and the weak. If the State of Rhode Island were separated from the Confederation and handed over to a popular government, acting with sovereign power and within narrow limits, it cannot be doubted that the tyranny of the majorities would render the exercise of rights so uncertain, that one would come to call for a power altogether independent of the people. The factions themselves, which would have made it necessary, would hasten to call for it.”

Jefferson also said: “The executive power, in our government, is not the only, is perhaps not the principal object of my concern. The tyranny of the legislature is presently, and will be for many more years, the danger most to be feared. That of the executive power will come in its turn, but at a more distant time.”7 On this subject, I prefer to cite Jefferson more than anyone else because I consider him the most powerful apostle that democracy has ever had.

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i Mandats impératifs. These words were translated as “pledged delegates” by Tocqueville’s own translator, Henry Reeve, almost certainly in reference to the American political parties’ practice of requiring delegates to nominating conventions and electors to the electoral college to pledge in advance to vote for a certain candidate. However, Tocqueville’s choice of the words mandats impératifs, and his explanation of them in the third paragraph of [258], go beyond the simple example of pledged delegates.

ii immatérialisent le despotisme: literally, “make despotism immaterial.” Tocqueville does not mean that democracy makes despotism into something negligible. He means that democracy exercises a despotic power over men’s ideas rather than directly over their actions.

iii The word translated as “impossible to seize hold of” is insaisissable. Insaisissable, whose literal translation would be “unseizable,” can mean “impalpable”; “elusive”; “unfathomable”; or, in law, “not subject to seizure” (as of property or goods).

iv ils feindront encore de vous la refuser. That is to say: they will feel constrained to refuse you their esteem even though that refusal does not reflect their true feelings of esteem for you.

v The courtiers (courtisans) were those who frequented and were attached to the court (cour). Because they sought to curry favor with the powerful, courtisan also came to mean flatterer or sycophant.

1. We have seen, when examining the Federal Constitution, that the legislators of the Union made contrary efforts. The result of these efforts was to make the Federal Government more independent in its sphere than that of the States. But the Federal Government is concerned almost exclusively with external affairs; it is the State governments that really govern American society.

2. The legislative acts promulgated in the state of Massachusetts alone, from 1780 to the present, already fill three fat volumes. One also has to note that the collection I am talking about was revised in 1823 and that many ancient or pointless laws were removed from it. Now the state of Massachusetts, which is not more populous than one of our départements, may be said to be the most stable in the whole Union and the one which puts the most continuity and wisdom into its undertakings.

3. Nobody would wish to claim that a people cannot abuse its power vis-à-vis another people. Now, parties are like so many small nations within a great one; their relation to one another is like that of foreign countries.

If one agrees that a nation may be tyrannical toward another nation, how can one deny that a party may be the same way toward another party?

4. In Baltimore, during the War of 1812, there was a striking example of the excess to which the despotism of the majority may lead. At this time the war was very popular in Baltimore. A newspaper which displayed strong opposition to it provoked with this conduct the indignation of the inhabitants. The people gathered together, broke the presses, and attacked the journalists’ house. An effort was made to assemble the militia, but it did not respond to the call. In order to save the unfortunates whom the public furor was menacing, the decision was made to put them in prison, as if they were criminals. This precaution was futile: during the night, the people gathered again; the magistrates having failed to assemble the militia, the prison was broken into, one of the journalists was killed on the spot, and the others left for dead: the offenders brought before the jury were acquitted.

I once said to an inhabitant of Pennsylvania:

“Explain to me, please, how, in a State founded by Quakers, and famous for its tolerance, free Negroes are not permitted to exercise the rights of citizens. They pay taxes, isn’t it just for them to have the vote?”

“Don’t insult us,” he answered me, “by thinking that our legislators have committed such a gross act of injustice and intolerance.”

“So, in your State, blacks have the right to vote?”

“Without any doubt.”

“Then, how does it happen that at the electoral college this morning I did not notice a single one in the gathering?”

“That is not the fault of the law,” the American told me; “the Negroes have, it is true, the right to take part in elections, but they abstain from appearing voluntarily.”

“That is very modest of them.”

“Oh! it’s not that they refuse to go there, but they are afraid of being mistreated there. In our State, it sometimes happens that the law lacks force when the majority does not support it. Now, the majority is imbued with the greatest prejudices against the Negroes, and the magistrates do not feel that they have the force to guarantee them the rights which the legislature has granted them.”

“What! The majority, which has the privilege of making the law, also wants to have the privilege of disobeying the law?”

5. Power can be centralized in an assembly; then it is strong but not stable; it can be centralized in a man: then it is less strong, but it is more stable.

6. It is not necessary, I think, to warn the reader that here, as in the rest of the chapter, I am speaking not of the Federal government, but of the particular governments of each State which the majority governs despotically.

7. Letter of Jefferson to Madison, 15 March 1789.