by John Marini
Widespread American rejection of Lockean natural rights and legitimacy conferred by the consent of the governed paved the way for Progressive utopianism and for Darwinian racial teachings as well. In some forms, this rejection of moderation and embracement of radicalism took the notion of the universal and homogeneous world state (as in Alexandre Kojève), and in others became an embracement of fascism (as in Carl Schmitt’s work). Whatever the direction, when History replaced natural right, it meant the rejection of reason and the rule of law. The absolute authority to act against the Depression that President Franklin Roosevelt demanded in his first inaugural provided the political foundation for the administrative state.
Grounded in the study of political philosophy, Marini’s essays underscore how the administrative state is a different form of regime or government than that established by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
9
Tocqueville’s Centralized Administration and the “New Despotism”
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE is well known for his elaboration of the principle of equality as the animating force of modern democratic politics. Less well known, and often less well understood, is his analysis of the concept of centralization. Centralization was a primary concern of Tocqueville throughout much of his life. From the time he attended François Guizot’s lectures on the History of Civilization in Europe, at age twenty-four in Paris, to his own classic account of centralization in The Old Regime and the Revolution, he became increasingly and ever more profoundly concerned with this issue. Tocqueville was so impressed with Guizot’s historical analysis of the development of modern society that he wrote Beaumont: “We must re-read this together this winter my dear friend; it is prodigious in analysis of ideas.”1
In that work, Guizot “developed the theme that European civilization was shaped by the theory and practice of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, and that the victory of the democratic force was the essential thread of Europe’s history.”2 However, Guizot observed, the development of free political institutions was constantly challenged by the irresistible centralizing tendencies of modern government. Guizot was among the first to consider the modern state as a form of administration. In his lectures, he noted,
Under the most general point of view, administration consists in an aggregate of means destined to propel, as promptly and certainly as possible, the will of the central power through all parts of society and to make the face of society, whether consisting of men or money, return again, under the same conditions, to the central power.3
Modern society really begins in the sixteenth century, Guizot maintained, by virtue of the “silent and hidden process of centralization, both in social relations and in the opinions of men—a process accomplished without premeditation or design.”4 Centralization, then, is the inevitable concomitant of democracy. Tocqueville, although impressed with Guizot’s method and his analysis, never appeared to believe that the process of centralization was a providential fact. But, for reasons of his own, he devoted much of his scholarly life to the elucidation and elaboration of this idea of providence. In Tocqueville’s hands, centralization received its most profound treatment.
In Tocqueville’s view, it is the principle of equality that is the irresistible force of modern times. All democratic regimes are characterized by a commitment to equality, and all modern regimes will be democratic. In postdemocratic times, it is no longer principled issues that are of decisive importance in practical life, but the growth and development of the administrative state that shapes the essential character of social life. Centralization, though not fated, is the silent, continuous, almost natural tendency, that threatens to undermine that legitimate passion for equality that is compatible with liberty. Alongside the “manly and legitimate passion for equality,” Tocqueville asserts, there is “a depraved taste for equality in the human heart that brings the weak to want to draw the strong to their level and that reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.”5 The modern bureaucratic state becomes the vehicle that reduces the individual to servitude. It does so by supplying all the needs of the body; in the process it enslaves the soul. The centralized administrative state becomes the “tutelary power … which alone takes charge of assuring [men’s] enjoyments and watching over [their] fate.” This power, Tocqueville noted, was
absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood.… It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?6
The “slow process of bureaucratic government,” Seymour Drescher has observed, “is the Frankenstein of the egalitarian process … it silently subverts the integrity of individuals and associations.”7 Tocqueville hoped to call attention to this process, almost before it began, by elaborating the theoretical and practical aspects of centralization.
In The Old Regime and the Revolution, Tocqueville documented the growth and development of the centralized administrative state. He traced its origin to the theory and practice of modern democratic egalitarianism. The French intellectuals and philosophers, as well as the monarchy, contributed to the administrative centralization that would become the hallmark of the modern nation-state. Moreover, the French Revolution succeeded in accelerating those centralizing tendencies, while destroying the elements in French society that could resist them. However, it was “towards the middle of the eighteenth century,” he observed, “that a group of writers known as the ‘Physiocrats’ or ‘Economists’ who made the problem of public administration their special study, came on the scene.”8 The form of tyranny “sometimes described as ‘democratic despotism’ … was championed by the Economists well before the Revolution.” In fact, he suggested, “the germinal ideas of practically all the permanent changes effected by the Revolution can be found in their works.”9 Their chief targets of attack “were those institutions which the Revolution was destined to sweep away forever.” More importantly, he noted, “their writings had the democratic-revolutionary tenor characteristic of so much modern thought. For they attacked not only specific forms of privilege but any kind of diversity whatsoever; to their thinking all men should be equal even if equality spelled servitude.”10 Tocqueville analyzed their political program:
They were for abolishing all hierarchies, all class distinctions, all differences of rank, and the nation was to be composed of individuals almost exactly alike and unconditionally equal. In this undiscriminated mass was to reside, theoretically, the sovereign power, yet it was to be carefully deprived of any means of controlling or even supervising the activities of its own government. For above it was a single authority, its mandatory, which was entitled to do anything and everything in its name without consulting it. This authority could not be controlled by public opinion since public opinion had no means of making itself heard; the State was a law unto itself and nothing short of a revolution could break its tyranny.11
In Tocqueville’s opinion, the Economists or Physiocrats were forerunners of those socialist thinkers who called for “the unlimited rights of the State.” He believed that “socialism and centralization thrive on the same soil; they stand to each other as the cultivated to the wild species of a fruit.”12 Tocqueville’s theoretical analysis of the concept of centralization required bringing to light the development of the modern bureaucratic state. At the same time, he hoped to shed new light on the character of modern despotism. In the process, he hoped to preserve the civic spiritedness necessary to allow men to be free.
Tocqueville was impressed with the absence of a centralized administration in the Ameri
ca of the 1830s. He noted in the first volume of Democracy in America, “We have seen that in the United States administrative decentralization does not exist.… But in the United States, governmental centralization exists to the highest point.”13 What Tocqueville most admired was “not the administrative effects of centralization, but its political effects.”14 The most important political effect of decentralization—or provincial institutions—was the creation of a kind of civic spiritedness and love of liberty necessary to keep individuals from becoming completely preoccupied with their own private interests and pleasures.
He observed,
What does it matter to me, after all, that there should be an authority always on its feet, keeping watch that my pleasures are tranquil, flying ahead of my steps to turn away every danger without my even needing to think about it, if this authority, at the same time that it removes the least thorns on my path, is absolute master of my freedom and my life, if it monopolizes movement and existence to such a point that everything around it must languish when it languishes, that everything must sleep when it sleeps, that everything must perish if it dies?15
Tocqueville was convinced that the democratic tendency was toward centralizing administrative and governmental authority in the same hands: the central power. In the past several decades, American government has become centrally administered at the national level. Tocqueville’s predictions of the political effects of such centralization have been largely borne out. However, his warning concerning the despotic character of centralization has been widely ignored, especially by that most sophisticated and informed segment of society: the intellectuals. Intellectual, or elite, opinion—which often shapes the most influential public opinion on these matters—sharply diverges from the commonsense understanding of what is now called bureaucratization. The intellectual elite’s acceptance of a certain “taste” for equality, which necessitates those “general ideas” and the kind of uniformity from which administrative centralization inevitably springs, has undermined Tocqueville’s treatment of the despotic character of such centralization. Tocqueville’s “philosophic analysis” of centralization was aimed at a similar intellectual elite, whose views began to dominate public discourse on this issue in the nineteenth century. It was not the first time that decent political practice required such a defense.
Recently, Henry Steele Commager criticized Tocqueville for what he described as “Tocqueville’s Mistake.”16 Commager insisted that “centralization and a strong national government have extended, not curtailed, our liberties.” He implies that the contemporary conservative criticism of centralization is only part of an attack on the social programs of liberal governments.
He suggests, therefore, that “those who declaim against Big Government as the enemy of liberty are ignorant of American history.”17 He contends that the central government abolished slavery and extended the civil rights of various minority groups. Consequently, he is unable to comprehend the contemporary popular animus against centralization. He states, “perhaps the most astonishing feature of the current attack on centralization, an attack that President Reagan has turned into a crusade, is the argument that the United States today has not a strong national government but a Big Government.”18 Commager insists that the national government is not “Big Government” when compared with most governments of the world. Moreover, he implies that Tocqueville’s analysis is no longer relevant. “What Tocqueville failed to see,” he asserts, “was that in a federal system like the American, the problem of the role of local and central governments has taken on a new character.”19
Unlike Commager, most Americans believe that the national government is a “big government,” and for that reason not as strong as it ought to be. Popularly understood, big government is bureaucratic government, government concerned not with the general or public principles of the regime but, increasingly, the minute regulations of the private and particular details of social existence. This view is closely akin to the distinction Tocqueville makes between government and administration. Commager appears not to have considered the importance of this crucial distinction in Tocqueville’s analysis of centralization. Tocqueville observed, “for my part, I cannot conceive that a nation can live or above all prosper without a high degree of governmental centralization.” He noted, however, “I think that administrative centralization is fit only to enervate the peoples who submit to it, because it constantly tends to diminish the spirit of the city in them.”20 Free men must take an active part in the conduct of their affairs. Elite opinion appears to have championed a conception of equality that denigrates liberty and leads to ever-greater uniformity. The contemporary intellectual understanding of centralization is so alien to the spirit of Tocqueville’s views that his analysis must be recovered by considering its origins.
Centralization – “A Philosophic Analysis”
“Centralization,” John Stuart Mill observed in 1862, is “one among the political questions of the age which bears the strongest marks of being destined to remain a question for generations to come.”21 The importance of this question, Mill asserted, “is constantly tending to increase, by the perpetual growth of collective action among mankind and the progress made in the settlement of other questions which stand before it in the natural order of discussion.” The more “exciting subject of Forms of Government,” which had for so long dominated political debate, he suggests, “is likely to be much sooner, at least theoretically settled.” This is so because “it is simpler in itself,” and “it admits … of a more definite answer.”22 The question of the legitimacy of popular government, not to mention its form, appears to admit almost no further debate. “Centralization; or in other words, the limits which separate the province of government from that of individual and spontaneous agency, and of central from local government” is the issue, Mill asserts, “which is destined to dominate political discourse for the foreseeable future.”23
There is little doubt that Mill’s understanding of this question was decisively shaped by Tocqueville. Mill recorded his debt in his Autobiography. He noted there that a
subject on which I derived great benefit from the study of Tocqueville was the fundamental question of Centralization. The powerful philosophic analysis which he applied to American and to French experience, led him to attach the utmost importance to the performance of as much of the collective business of society, as can safely be so performed by the people themselves.24
The value of Tocqueville’s contribution, quite apart from his practical conclusions, derived from his “philosophic analysis,” which elevated the issue of centralization to a new theoretical level.
Mill suggested that it was as a result of Tocqueville’s powerful analysis of this issue that he himself was alerted to the danger of centralization. European attitudes toward central and local government and administration derived largely from experience and habit. Mill noted that in England, unlike the Continent, “centralization was … the subject not only of rational disapprobation, but of unreasoning prejudice; where jealousy of Government interference was a blind feeling preventing or resisting even the most beneficial exertion of legislative authority.”25 If popular opinion depended upon habit and circumstance, and perhaps chance, Tocqueville was responsible for informing “philosophic” opinion. As Mill observed, “The more certain the public were to go wrong on the side opposed to Centralization, the greater danger was there lest philosophic reformers should fall into the contrary error.” Mill himself was “actively engaged in defending important measures” that would have led to increased administrative centralization, and “had it not been for the lessons of Tocqueville,”26 he would have failed to see that the prejudice of his countrymen was more enlightened than the opinions of the philosophic reformers. “The reaction … against governmentalism and centralization, and in favor of individual and local agency is at present intense,” Mill noted, and “the renewed and more serious movement in this beneficent direction is usually dated from the publication of the
great work of M. de Tocqueville.”27
Mill insisted that Tocqueville’s thought was indispensable in the creation of the “serious movement” in the direction “against governmentalism and centralization and in favor of individual and local agency.” There were few issues that Tocqueville considered with greater care or seriousness than the problem of centralization. Indeed, he commented in a letter concerning this subject, “I sense that I am treating there the most important idea of our time.”28 In his Journeys to England and Ireland, Tocqueville recorded in his notes the following observation: “Centralization … Preparation for despotism.”29 Tocqueville always believed that “despotism would be the inevitable but (almost) silent companion to the centralized state.”30 In focusing on centralization, Tocqueville hoped to expose the sinister aspect of the passion for equality. Toward the end of the second volume of Democracy in America, Tocqueville observed,
Every central power that follows these natural instincts loves equality and favors it; for equality singularly facilitates the action of such a power, extends it, and secures it. It can also be said that every central government adores uniformity; uniformity spares it the examination of an infinity of details with which it would have to occupy itself if it were necessary to make a rule for men, instead of making all men pass indiscriminately under the same rule. Thus the government loves what citizens love, and it naturally hates what they hate. This community of sentiments which, in democratic nations, continuously unites each individual and the sovereign in the same thought, establishes a secret and permanent sympathy between them. The government is pardoned for its faults for the sake of its tastes.31
Consequently, Tocqueville suggests, “the first, and in a way the only, necessary condition for arriving at centralizing public power in a democratic society is to love equality or make it believed [that one does]. Thus the science of despotism, formerly so complicated, is simplified: it is reduced, so to speak, to a single principle.”32 For this reason, Tocqueville believed that “it is easier to establish an absolute and despotic government in a people whose conditions are equal than in any other.”33 Although “democratic peoples are instinctively drawn toward centralization of powers,” he noted, “they tend to do it in an unequal manner. That depends on particular circumstances that can develop or restrict the natural effects of the social state.”34 In America, those circumstances were extremely propitious. Tocqueville’s practical task was to clarify the meaning of centralization. His philosophic analysis required a clarification of the idea that lay at the heart of modern political practice.