Unmasking the Administrative State

by John Marini

At its most fundamental level, centralization is derivative of the desire for perfectibility and the taste for general ideas, or the quest for rationality and uniformity. It is the practical culmination of the transformation of modern political life and institutions, brought about by modern political philosophy and science. “One cannot believe,” Tocqueville observed, “how many facts naturally flow from the philosophic theory according to which man is indefinitely perfectible, and what a prodigious influence it exerts even on those who, always being occupied only with acting and not thinking, seem to conform their actions to it without knowing it.”63 What is the idea to which theory and practice are made to conform? Tocqueville wrote,

  Equality suggests several ideas to the human mind that would not otherwise have come to it, and it modifies almost all those already there. I take as an example the idea of human perfectibility because it is one of the principle ones which intelligence can conceive and because it alone constitutes in itself a great philosophic theory whose consequences are displayed at each instant in the practice of affairs.64

  Like Rousseau, Tocqueville regards perfectibility as the distinguishing characteristic of man. “Although man resembles the animal in several points,” Tocqueville noted, “one feature is peculiar to him alone: he perfects himself and they do not perfect themselves.”65

  “[P]erfectibility,” Tocqueville asserted, is “as old as the world,” but equality “gives it a new character.” When citizens were classified by rank, profession, birth, men believed they could see the “furthest boundaries of human power near himself, and none seeks any longer to struggle against an inevitable destiny.” In his view, aristocratic societies thought in terms of “improvement, not change.” They imagined “the conditions of coming societies as better, but not different.”66

  When “castes disappear, as classes get closer to each other,” when “mixed tumultuously, and their usages, customs, and laws vary,” Tocqueville remarked, “the image of an ideal and always fugitive perfection is presented to the human mind.” Under these circumstances, “continual changes then pass at each instant before the eyes of each man”; they observe that “man improves his lot,” and they conclude “that man in general is endowed with indefinite faculty for improvement.”67 When change occurs and conditions become more equal, Tocqueville observed that “each man in particular becomes more like all the others, weaker and smaller[;] one gets used to no longer viewing citizens so as to consider only the people.” Individuals are forgotten “so as to think only of the species.” At such times, he noted, “the human mind loves to embrace a host of diverse objects at once; it constantly aspires to be able to link a multitude of consequences to a single cause.” The “idea of unity” then “obsesses the mind.”68 Throughout much of the second volume of Democracy in America, Tocqueville attempted to show the manner in which the “predominating taste of democratic people for very general ideas” manifested itself in politics, philosophy, and religion.

  Centralization appeared to be the almost inevitable concomitant of the desire for uniformity and the taste for general ideas. In a conversation with John Stuart Mill in England in 1833, Mill made it clear to Tocqueville that it was the English abhorrence of general ideas that was largely responsible for the administrative decentralization in that country. In his notes, published as Journeys to England and Ireland, Tocqueville recorded his conversations with Mill on this subject. In questioning Mill on the danger of centralization, he asked if he feared “the present tendency of his country toward centralization.” Mill replied that he did not, because “up to now centralization has been the thing most foreign to the English temperament.” He noted further,

  Our habits or the nature of our temperament do not in the least draw us towards general ideas; but centralization is based on general ideas; that is the desire for power to attend in a uniform and general way, to the present and future needs of society. We have never considered government from such a lofty point of view. So we have divided administrative functions up infinitely and have made them independent of one another. We have not done this deliberately, but from our sheer inability to comprehend general ideas on the subject of government or anything else. The tendency of English politics up to now has been to remain as free as possible to do what was convenient. The taste for making others submit to a way of life which one thinks more useful for them than they do themselves, is not a common taste in England.69

  But “could it not be,” Tocqueville asked, “that what you call the English temperament is the aristocratic temperament?” Mill admitted he had not considered the possibility. Is it not the “aristocratic temperament,” Tocqueville inquired, which is likely “to isolate oneself … to be more afraid of being disturbed in one’s own domain, than wishful to extend it over others?” Is not “the instinct of democracy exactly opposite,” Tocqueville asked, “and may it not be that the present tendency which you consider as an accident is an almost necessary consequence of the basic cause?”70 The demise of the aristocracy, Tocqueville implied, leads almost inevitably to centralization. Why is this so?

  Tocqueville’s analysis of the problem was developed in his study, The Old Regime and the Revolution. This work only strengthened his belief that the destruction of the aristocracy accelerated the tendency toward centralization. But, in one of the novel findings of his research, Tocqueville discovered that centralizing tendencies were already apparent in the old regime. However, there was no principle involved in centralization prior to the French Revolution. It was the greed of the aristocracy and the desire for money and power on the part of the monarchy that resulted in increased centralization prior to the Revolution. In the decades preceding the Revolution, “feudal institutions had broken down to such an extent that the nobility had retained many of the privileges, but virtually none of its political authority.”71

  In The Old Regime, Tocqueville demonstrated the means by which “the monarchy centralized all administrative power under its own authority.” The central power “controlled either directly, or indirectly, virtually every aspect of provincial and local life including public order.”72 Local autonomy nearly disappeared, and the nobility ceased to play an administrative role in the community—it was virtually powerless. Moreover, it ceased to concern itself with public affairs and was wholly preoccupied with its private pleasures. The aristocracy in France relinquished its power in exchange for its privilege—primarily the exemption from taxes. Tocqueville asserted that the old regime succumbed on the day that the French people “permitted the king to impose a tax without their consent and the nobles showed so little public spirit as to connive at this, provided their own immunity was guaranteed—it was on that fateful day that the seeds were sown of almost all the vices and abuses which led to the violent downfall of the old regime.”73

  The lack of public spiritedness on the part of the French aristocracy stood in sharp contrast to the British nobility. “The English aristocracy,” Tocqueville noted, “took upon itself the heaviest public charges in order that it would be allowed to govern; in France the nobility retained to the very end its exemption from taxes to console itself for having lost control of the government.”74 If the French nobility lost its political virtue and ceased to be an aristocracy, becoming instead what Tocqueville called a caste—composed of individuals concerned with private economic advantage—with its destruction, every barrier to centralization was removed.

  However, when “that ancient institution, the French monarchy, after being swept away by the tidal wave of the Revolution, was restored in 1800,” Tocqueville asked, “how was it possible for this part of the old regime to be … integrated into the constitution of modern France?” The centralization of power “did not perish in the Revolution,” he noted, because “whenever a nation destroys its aristocracy, it almost automatically tends toward a centralization of power.”75 The revolutionaries, despite their hatred of central power, could not prevent even greater centralization of authority. Nonetheless, prior to the Revolution, “it (was
) due to habits and not to ideas that … centralization remained strongly established.” In spite of the fact that “the future revolutionaries themselves”—in their pamphlets—were “opposed to centralization and in favor of local rule.”76 Tocqueville demonstrated that “the democratic revolution, though it did away with so many institutions of the past, was led inevitably to consolidate this one; centralization fitted in so well with the program of the new social order that the common error of believing it to have been a creation of the Revolution is easily accounted for.”77

  In his Correspondence with Gobineau, Tocqueville took Gobineau to task for asserting that The Old Regime was a book about “administrative institutions.” As Tocqueville recorded in his “Notes” on what was to have been the second volume of The Old Regime, “The influence of administrative practices on the destiny of a people should not be exaggerated. The principal source of these (political) vices and virtues are always to be found in the original ideas.”78 He outlined the principle “ideas at the base of the new social and governmental system” in his Notes:

  Natural equality must be represented in all institutions.… The sovereign power resides in the nation. It is one and omnipotent. It is not from traditions, not from examples, not from precedents, not from the particular rights of certain bodies or classes, not from the rights achieved, not from established religions that these principles derive, but from general reason, from the natural and primordial laws regulating the human species.79

  The triumph of general ideas goes hand in hand with the destruction of all intermediate powers. Thus Tocqueville noted, “centralization does not develop in a democratic people only according to the progress of equality, but also according to the manner in which that equality is founded.”80 It is true, he observed, that “in democratic peoples[,] government is naturally presented to the human mind only in the form of a lone central power and that the notion of intermediate powers is not familiar to it.” This is particularly true in regard to “democratic nations that have seen the principle of equality triumph with the aid of a violent revolution.” In such a circumstance, because “the classes that directed local affairs disappear all at once in this storm and the confused mass that remains still has neither the organization nor the habits that permit it to take the administration of its own affairs in hand, one no longer perceives anything but the state itself that can take charge of all the details of government.” Centralization “becomes a fact, and in a sense, a necessity.”81

  For this reason, Tocqueville insisted that “one must neither praise nor blame Napoleon for having concentrated almost all administrative powers in his hands alone; for after the abrupt disappearance of the nobility and the haute bourgeoisie, these powers came to him of themselves; it would have been almost as difficult for him to repel them as to take them up.” However, this was not the case in the United States, because the Americans derived from the aristocracy of England “the idea of individual rights and the taste for local freedoms; and they have been able to preserve both because they have not had to combat aristocracy.”82

  In Tocqueville’s view, aristocratic institutions form a bulwark against those tendencies in democratic society toward centralization. He commented in detail on the differences in the old societies. Unity and uniformity “were nowhere to be found.” Nor had there developed a taste for general ideas in aristocratic societies. Tocqueville more than once points to the fact that the English had an aversion to generalization. But, he noted, “a more or less highly developed culture is not by itself enough to account for a taste for or aversion from generalization.” Rather, it is in aristocratic societies that he discerns a distaste for generalization:

  When conditions are very unequal and the inequalities are permanent, individuals little by little become so unalike that one would say there are as many distinct humanities as there are classes; one always discovers only one of them at a time, and losing sight of the general bond that brings all together in the vast bosom of the human race, one ever views only some men, not man. Those who live in these aristocratic societies, therefore, never conceive very general ideas relative to themselves, and that is enough to give them a habitual distrust of these ideas and an instinctive distaste for them.83

  Tocqueville traced the origin of the taste for generalization to Christianity. Societies in antiquity were aristocratic. To illustrate his point, Tocqueville argued that “the most profound and vast geniuses of Rome and Greece were never able to arrive at the idea, so general but at the same time so simple, of the similarity of men and of the equal right of freedom that each bears from birth.” They were at pains to show that slavery was natural and would always exist: “all the great writers of antiquity,” Tocqueville insisted, “were a part of the aristocracy of masters, or at least they saw that aristocracy established without dispute before their eyes; their minds, after expanding in many directions, were therefore found limited in that one, and it was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal.”84 Christianity made egalitarian societies possible, and unity and uniformity in politics and society likely.

  Unlike man in aristocratic society, democratic man “finds near him only beings who are almost the same; he therefore cannot consider any part whatsoever of the human species without having his thought enlarge and dilate to embrace the sum.” Truths which apply to himself seem equally to apply to all men. “Having contracted the habit of general ideas in the one study with which he most occupies himself and which most interests him, he carries the same habit over to all the others.” Thus, says Tocqueville, “the need to discover common rules for all things, to enclose many objects within the same form, and to explain a collection of facts by a single cause becomes an ardent and often blind passion of the human mind.” The equality of conditions and standards brings “each to seek the truth by himself.” It is “easy to see that such a method will imperceptibly make the human mind tend toward general ideas.” When traditions of class, of profession, and of family are repudiated and men “escape the empire of example to seek by the effort of [their] reason alone the path to follow,” Tocqueville observed, “I am inclined to draw the grounds of [my] opinions from the very nature of man, which necessarily leads [me], almost without [my] knowing it, toward a great number of very general notions.”85

  However, Tocqueville insisted that “general ideas do not attest to the strength of human intelligence, but rather to its insufficiency, because there are no beings in nature exactly alike: no identical facts, no rules indiscriminately applicable in the same manner to several objects at once.”86 Nature is hostile to uniformity. Nonetheless, a central power attempts to oversee all the details of the life of a nation. But, such a power, Tocqueville asserted, “however learned one imagines it, cannot gather to itself alone all the details of the life of a great people.” It cannot do so “because such a work exceeds human strength.”87 Tocqueville noted the sterile character of such an attempt in the following observation:

  Men put the greatness of the idea of unity in the means, God in the end; hence it is that the idea of greatness leads to a thousand [instances] of pettiness. To force all men to march in the same march, toward the same object—that is the human idea. To introduce variety into actions, but to combine them in a manner so that all these actions lead by a thousand diverse ways toward the accomplishment of one great design—that is a divine idea.88

  Democratic peoples “naturally favor the concentration of powers.” The idea of secondary powers, “between sovereign and subjects, naturally presented itself to the imagination of aristocratic peoples because these powers contained within them individuals or families whom birth, enlightenment, and wealth held up as without peer and who seemed destined to command.”89 However, Tocqueville suggested, “for contrary reasons, the same idea is naturally absent from the minds of men in centuries of equality; it can only be introduced artificially then, and it is retained only with difficulty; whereas they
conceive, so to speak without thinking about it.”90

  Consequently, Tocqueville noted, “in politics, moreover, as in philosophy and religion, the intellect of democratic peoples receives simple and general ideas with delight. Complicated systems repel it, and it is pleased to imagine a great nation in which all of the citizens resemble a single model and are directed by a single power.” Once the idea of a single central power is grasped,

  the one that presents itself most spontaneously to the minds of men in centuries of equality is the idea of uniform human legislation. As each of them sees himself little different from his neighbors, he hardly understands why the rule that is applicable to one man should not be equally so to all others.… The slightest dissimilarities in the political institutions of the same people wound him, and legislative uniformity appears to him to be the first condition of a good government.91

  Democratic man as a result of the breakup of intermediate powers, the uniformity of ideas and feelings, comes at this moment to place all powers into the hands of the only authority that stands above all equally: the central power.

  It is at the time when all things have conspired to deprive the individual of any support in the society, when he is most isolated and alone, that the central power assumes the greatest authority over the individual. Moreover, it is in these circumstances that the individual is least concerned with the conduct of public affairs. Tocqueville noted, “it is above all at the moment when a democratic society succeeds in forming itself on the debris of an aristocracy that this isolation of men from one another and the selfishness resulting from it strike one’s regard most readily.”92 Because every person finds his beliefs within himself, “he turns all his sentiments toward himself alone.” Thus Tocqueville alerts us to the new and dangerous element of democratic society, what he calls “individualism.” “Individualism is a reflective and peaceable sentiment that disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of those like him and to withdraw to one side with his family and friends, so that after having thus created a little society for his own use, he willingly abandons society at large to itself.”93 The individual becomes isolated and alienated and is concerned primarily with his pleasure and physical comfort. At such time, Tocqueville remarked, “men are swept away and almost beside themselves at the sight of the new goods that they are ready to grasp.… [A]nd to watch better over what they call their affairs, they neglect the principal one, which is to remain masters of themselves.”94 Men are following two separate roads to servitude. He observed that “the taste for well-being turns them away from being involved in government, and the love of well-being puts them in an ever stricter dependence on those who govern.”95