by John Marini
The Practical Problem
If centralization were to be recognized as an issue of the first magnitude, it was imperative that Tocqueville clarify its meaning and establish the ground upon which the issue would be debated. “When we speak of centralization,” he noted, “we are always fighting in the shadows because of a failure to make the distinction between governmental and administrative centralization.”35 In his famous definition, he seeks to make this distinction with precision:
Certain interests, such as the enactment of general laws and the nation’s relations with foreigners, are common to all parts of the nation.
There are other interests of special concern to certain parts of the nation, such, for instance, as local enterprises.
To concentrate all the former in the same place or under the same directing power is to establish what I call governmental centralization.
To concentrate control of the latter in the same way is to establish what I call administrative centralization.36
However, it is almost impossible, theoretically, to maintain this celebrated distinction; it is full of ambiguity in practice. Tocqueville was aware of the difficulty. He noted, almost in the same breath, “There are some points where these two sorts of centralization become confused.”37
The difficulty is a practical one: how does one distinguish national from local interests? There cannot be a principle to regulate this distinction that would not succumb to necessity—particularly war. Far from defending decentralization, Tocqueville makes it clear that in America, administrative decentralization has been carried too far in ordinary times. “We have seen that the Americans have almost entirely isolated the administration from the government,” he observed. “In doing this they seem to have overstepped the limits of sane reason, for order, even in secondary matters, is still a national interest.”38 Is it possible that Tocqueville was unaware of this difficulty? It seems unlikely. Marvin Zetterbaum has noted in this regard,
Tocqueville not only does not provide a simple formula to distinguish matters concerning the general interest, from matters that may safely be left to local authorities; he recognizes that if a nation is subject to significant external pressures, local autonomy in anything other than trivial matters is impossible. In such a case, the distinction between national and local becomes arbitrary and meaningless.39
But Tocqueville was not concerned to resolve the issue as a practical matter; it is practically insoluble. In bringing the distinction to light, he hoped to expose the practical consequences of modern philosophic or ideological politics. Hence Tocqueville served a theoretical rather than a practical need. In his elaboration of the distinction between administration and government, Tocqueville brought to light the inherent tension between the general and particular, the common and self-interest, and the public and private spheres.
Mill’s comments on centralization are helpful in clarifying Tocqueville’s purpose. Mill, in his definition of centralization, distinguishes the governmental from the private, as well as from the central and local. This juxtaposition is not without significance, for he recognized two separate kinds of authority: the private, individual, and self-interested he associates with local government, or what Tocqueville called “administration,” and the general, uniform, and the public interest form the heart of central authority, or what Tocqueville characterizes as “government.” This analysis is instructive for it offers a corrective to the interpretation commonly held in our time. The contemporary understanding falls prey to the very tendency Tocqueville sought to expose in his analysis. Tocqueville, like Mill, was of the opinion that the different kinds of authority, implicit in the distinction “of central contrasted with local authority, as of government contrasted with the individual,” ought to be preserved with the view to tempering in practice the principle of popular sovereignty.
The contemporary understanding admits to a single legitimate center of authority: the public, the general, or the governmental. If the locus of that authority had shifted from the states to the national legislature since Tocqueville’s time, the principle is clear: there is nothing that government—primarily the legislature—cannot do. The democratic instinct that tends toward the nation-state also moves in the direction of uniform government and legislative supremacy. In Tocqueville’s time, it was the state legislatures that he looked to as the “locus of the tendency towards democratic centralism.”40 He noted:
The duties and the rights of the federal government were simple and easy enough to define, because the Union had been formed with the goal of responding to a few great general needs. The duties and rights of the state governments were, on the contrary, multiple and complicated, because these governments entered into all the details of social life.41
It is now the national government that has become involved in all the “details of social life,” but the principle remains the same. Tocqueville observed that the legislative power is the “power that emanates most directly from the people, it is also the one that participates the most in its omnipotence.”42 A recent observer, John Koritansky, has stated, “the legislature tends to be supreme because, strictly speaking, legislative supremacy is a necessary implication of democracy … not only is the legislature most directly responsible to the people … it is the legislative function that corresponds to the kind of political activity the people themselves would perform if they actually assembled.”43 Legislative supremacy appears to be the closest thing to direct popular rule, but it tends also “in the direction of a simple rule of law unimpeded by any perception of the need for administrative discretion or provincial autonomy.”44 The tendency is toward greater centralization as a consequence of the necessity to treat everything in a uniform manner. As Koritansky notes,
Any argument that limits the ability of the law to govern every last detail of human life always involves some allegation of complex circumstances that need special, particular accommodation. But democracy is always impatient with such claims. The image that corresponds most closely to the democracy’s vision of society is a social atomism; the atoms themselves being simple and perfectly interchangeable are suitably governed by a few majestic generalities. Democratic citizens always suspect the allegation of special circumstances to be a cover for inequality, and they reject inequality in turn because it is the source of these complexities that impede the simple rule of law.45
This leads necessarily to the creation of an “administrative class” formed to handle in a uniform and general way the details of everyday life.
This tendency in the direction of legislative supremacy and administrative unity, not to say uniformity, is so compelling—the notion of popular sovereignty so pervasive—that Tocqueville’s analysis of centralization has been undermined. Administrative centralization becomes necessary in democratic times to ensure greater efficiency and rationality, not to mention equity. Furthermore, the distinction between government and administration in Tocqueville’s sense has been replaced by the distinction between policymaking and execution. As Martin Diamond observed,
The most common understanding of Tocqueville’s distinction is the following: Government centralization means that policy should be made centrally, the power of legislation belongs to the central government, administrative decentralization requires that central policies be locally administered; the power of execution belongs to the localities.46
However, in Tocqueville’s view, both government and administration form an autonomous whole. Both are concerned with lawmaking and execution. The difference lies in the kind of authority characterized by each—administrative authority concerns the details of social life; it is private and self-interested, not to say particular. Governmental authority is principled and uniform, not to say general.
According to Tocqueville, the proper reconciliation of these two kinds of authority can occur only on the level of the community or township. It is there that both public and private interests can be properly considered. Such a resolution involves the necessity of abs
tracting from one’s private interest in the conduct of the ordinary details of life. Such an abstraction leads to the realization that every citizen must consider the whole or the common good first, or at least at the same time that he considers his own good. As a result, every citizen’s private interest is inseparable from his public duty. Private interest moderates public policy by attempting to preserve individual autonomy or freedom, and public spiritedness is engendered in the act of self-legislation. “There will be no stable order,” Tocqueville noted in Le Commerce, “as long as the law does not give to each citizen a political existence which bestows on each person both rights and duties; and thereby, a civic conscience, a respect for authority … a reasoned respect for the law.”47
The Theoretical Problem
Tocqueville’s analysis is, in the fundamental respect, primarily theoretical. It involves nothing less than the attempted reconciliation—on the level of political history—of the inherent tension that exists between the public and private, the general and particular. In the process, he hoped to forestall the worst aspect of democratic life—the tendency to administrative despotism. “To what degree,” he asked, “can these two principles of private and public welfare be blended? To what point can a conscience born of reflection and calculation overcome political passions not yet visible, but which cannot help arising?”48
Tocqueville’s distinction provided the conceptual means of isolating the tendency of modern government toward unity or centralization. He hoped to buttress those elements—provincial institutions—which could serve to mitigate its growth. He was aware that provincial institutions and local liberty are not the “natural government” of the modern world. They grew “almost secretly in the bosom of a half-barbaric society.” Left to themselves, “the institutions of township can scarcely struggle against an enterprising and strong government.”49 Their existence depends upon the civic virtue of a people. Thus, Tocqueville insisted that “decentralization, like liberty, is a thing which leaders promise their people, but which they never give them. To get and keep it, the people must count on their own sole efforts; if they do not care to do so the evil is beyond remedy.”50
In teaching democratic man the necessity of civic virtue, he would show them how to remain free.
Nonetheless, it is hard “to make the people take a share in government.” And “it is more difficult still to furnish them with the experience and to give them the sentiments that they lack to govern well.”51 Such a task requires the service of a legislator. The difficulty of Tocqueville’s project was nowhere better stated than in Rousseau’s The Social Contract:
Sages who wish to use their own language in addressing the vulgar instead of vulgar language cannot possibly make themselves understood. For … there are a multitude of ideas which it is impossible to express in the language of the people. Views that are too general … objects … too remote, are equally beyond their comprehension; and every individual, relishing no scheme of government but that which promotes his own private interest, cannot easily be made sensible of the benefits to be derived from continual privations imposed upon him by wholesome laws. For a newborn people to relish wise maxims of policy and to pursue the fundamental rules of statecraft, it would be necessary that the effect should become the cause; that the social mind, which should be the product of such an institution, would prevail even at the institution of society; and that men should be, before the formation of laws, what those laws alone can make them. The legislator being, from these reasons, unable to employ either force or argument, he must have recourse to an authority of another order, which can bear men away without violence, and persuade without convincing them.52
To what authority did Tocqueville have recourse to assist in the legislator’s task? He seems to have turned to “historical philosophy” to accomplish his purpose.
In his review of Democracy in America in 1840, John Stuart Mill stated, “It is perhaps the greatest defect of M. de Tocqueville’s book, that … his propositions even when derived from observation have the air of mere abstract speculation.”53 This criticism is rarely noted. Subsequently, Tocqueville’s own work was praised for the soundness of his practical observations. It was not “abstract speculation” that characterized his work but incisive analysis of sociological and political phenomena. His work is often thought to be a series of brilliant observations without theoretical coherence. One commentator, Marvin Zetterbaum, has remarked, “like other nineteenth-century theorists, Tocqueville was in revolt against those of his predecessors who had looked on political things in an abstract way.”54 Paradoxically, both Mill and Zetterbaum are right. Tocqueville was concerned with placing politics within a proper historical framework, but he was aware that every society is animated by certain ideas. Tocqueville believed that the science of politics gave
birth or at least form to those general concepts whence emerge the facts with which politicians have to deal, and the laws of which they believe themselves the inventors. They form a kind of atmosphere surrounding each society in which both rulers and governed have to draw intellectual breath, and whence—often without realizing it—both groups derive the principles of action. Only among barbarians does the practical side of politics exist alone.55
It is for this reason that Tocqueville desired a new political science for a new age.
America appeared to offer Tocqueville the historical material from which he could undertake an analysis of democracy. In his first letter written from American soil, Tocqueville seemed to have grasped the meaning of the opportunity presented to him. He wrote:
Picture to yourself … a society which comprises all nations of the world … people differing from one another in language, in beliefs, in opinions; in a word, a society possessing no roots, no memories, no prejudices, no routine, no common ideas, no national character.… The whole world over here seems to consist of malleable matter which forms and fashions to his liking.56
America offered Tocqueville the opportunity to “form those general concepts” of democratic society, in the process of describing “the general facts with which politicians have to deal.”
He noted his purpose in another way in another context: “I must find somewhere a solid, lasting basis of fact for my ideas. I can find this only as I write history.”57 If his study of the French Revolution provided an opportunity in this regard, he pointed to the greatest difficulty he encountered in pursuing his method. “The one that troubles me most,” he wrote, “arises from the mingling of history proper with historical philosophy. I do not yet see how I can mix the two things (and it is most important that this should be done, for one can put it that the former is the canvas, the latter the color—and both these are necessary to make a picture).”58
In blending history and historical philosophy, Tocqueville’s task is at once practical and theoretical. It was only by proceeding in this way that he could hope to moderate a politics that was in the process of becoming ideological. He noted,
It was political science, and often that science at its most abstract, which put into our father’s heads the germs of those new ideas which have since suddenly blossomed into political institutions and civil laws unknown to their forebears.… Among all civilized peoples the political sciences create, or at least give shape to, general ideas, and from these general ideas are found the problems in the midst of which politicians must struggle, and also the laws which they imagine they create. The political sciences form a sort of intellectual atmosphere breathed by both governors and governed in society, and both unwittingly derive from it the principles of their action.59
As a consequence of the unification of politics and a certain kind of modern philosophy, which occurred as a result of the French Revolution, the “natural link” between “opinions” and “tastes,” “acts” and “beliefs,” “feelings” and “ideas” had been severed. It “was the French,” Tocqueville observed in the chapter in which he described the “philosophical approach of the Americans,” who “turned the wor
ld upside down.” The reason “is not because the French changed their ancient beliefs and modified their ancient mores that they turned the world upside down; it is because they were the first to generalize and to bring to light a philosophic method with whose aid one could readily attack all ancient things and open the way to all new ones.”60 Tocqueville had observed the result in his Introduction to Democracy in America:
I search my memories in vain, and I find nothing that should evoke more sadness and more pity than what is passing before our eyes; it seems that in our day the natural bond that unites opinions to tastes and actions to beliefs has been broken; the sympathy that has been noticeable in all times between the sentiments and ideas of men appears destroyed; one would say that all the laws of moral analogy have been abolished.61
Tocqueville’s purpose is to inspirit democratic man by forging artificial links to replace the broken natural link. In the process he will have established new laws of moral analogy. “Whereas only observations and facts are necessary to demonstrate mathematical truths,” Tocqueville noted, “to understand and believe moral truths, mores are needed.”62
Centralization and Despotism