Unmasking the Administrative State

by John Marini

  Despotism, Tocqueville wrote, “sees the most certain guarantee of its own duration in the isolation of men, and it ordinarily puts all its care into isolating them.” The problem is that “[e]quality places men beside one another without a common bond to hold them. Despotism raises barriers between them and separates them. Equality disposes them to think of those like themselves, and for them despotism makes a sort of public virtue of indifference.”96 How is it possible, Tocqueville asked, “that a society should escape destruction if the moral tie be not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed?”97

  Recently, Roger Boesche has suggested that “previous theorists assumed that despotism required an extremely hierarchical society. Tocqueville agrees that despotism hinges on isolation, but he recognizes a new and modern historical development encouraging a despotism that need not rely on force (but instead can make servitude delightful).”98 This new despotism is particularly to be feared because it may be unrecognizable. Tocqueville attempted to teach democratic man the “feeling” and “attitudes” of oppression, for modern despotism will be accompanied by ever-greater physical comforts. It endangers not the body but the soul.

  As Tocqueville noted:

  Fetters and headsman were the coarse instruments that tyranny formerly employed; but the civilization of our age has perfected despotism itself, though it seemed to have nothing to learn.… Under the absolute sway of one man the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul; but the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose proudly superior. Such is not the course adopted in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved.99

  In Tocqueville’s view, only freedom could forestall the worst aspects of the new despotism. In his Foreword to The Old Regime, he articulated his mature reflection on the issue:

  Freedom and freedom alone can extirpate these vices, which indeed are innate in communities of this order; it alone can call a halt to their pernicious influence. For only freedom can deliver the member of a community from that isolation which is the lot of the individual left to his own devices and, compelling them to get in touch with each other, promote an active sense of fellowship. In a community of free citizens every man is daily reminded of the need of meeting his fellow men … of exchanging ideas, and coming to an agreement as to the conduct of their common interests. Freedom alone is capable of lifting men’s minds above mere mammon worship.… It alone replaces at certain critical moments their natural love of material welfare by a loftier, more virile ideal.100

  Tocqueville insisted that “in the democratic centuries that are going to open up, individual independence and local liberties will always be the product of art. Centralization will be the natural government.”101 In his “most enlightened speculation” on the issue of administrative centralization, Tocqueville offered the legislator’s art in the service of genuine liberty.

  In an important respect, Tocqueville has been remarkably influential in shaping the “attitudes” and “feelings” of the individual in modern society, particularly with regard to the problem of what is now called “bureaucracy.” His success can be seen in the remark of a contemporary observer:

  The contempt in which bureaucracy is held in modern thinking and prejudice, the insensitivity to honour that is also present in this function of government—this contempt was for all time given respectability by Tocqueville’s history.102

  10

  On Harvey Mansfield’s Jefferson Lecture: How to Understand Politics

  HARVEY MANSFIELD WAS GIVEN the high honor of delivering the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities in Washington in 2007.1 That privilege, not often given to a political scientist, is the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities. This panel, in a much smaller way (and with the blessing of the American Political Science Association), is also an attempt to honor his achievement. We here, I think, understand and appreciate the importance of Harvey Mansfield’s contribution to our understanding of politics. This discipline, which is perhaps reluctant to praise its most severe and honest critics, too, owes him a debt of gratitude not only for his scholarship, but for his extraordinary influence as a teacher as well. I need only look at the other presenters on this panel—I believe nearly all of them were his students at various times. Consequently, we have not only his work, but his influence on the many contributions of his students as well. In his lecture, Mansfield raised the question of how to understand politics by asking “How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science.” In doing so, he expressed his reservations concerning the dominant way of trying to understand politics—the scientific study of politics. The fundamental problem of a political science that seeks to be scientific in the manner of natural science is that it must ignore the question of importance, which he says “is the central question in politics.” “Politics is about who deserves to be more important: which leader from which party with which ideas. Politics assumes that the contest for importance is important: in a grander sense it assumes that human beings are important.”

  In the attempt to establish scientific truth as the ground of objective knowledge, political science has become dependent upon a method that seeks to comprehend only behavior, and only in the aggregate, and only on behalf of universal abstractions. In doing so, scientific political science alienates itself from what is of paramount importance in political life: the individual human being. “Human beings and their associations always have names,” Mansfield says. “They maintain their individuality by the use of proper names.” They might even have souls and may sometimes insist upon their own importance. Mansfield offers some suggestions for improving our understanding of politics. First, he thinks that political science should “recapture the notion of thumos” (spiritedness, a philosophic concept derived from Plato and Aristotle), which refers, he says, “to a part of the soul that makes us want to insist on our own importance.” The “second improvement,” he tells us, “is the use of names—proper to literature and foreign to science.” “Literature,” he says, “tells stories of characters with names, in places with names, in times with dates.” We come to understand in the course of his lecture that the humanities, understood broadly as philosophy, and history as well as literature, knows something that science does not: “the human resistance to hearing the truth.… While science aims at agreement among scientists, in literature as in philosophy the greatest names disagree with one another.”

  Mansfield, it becomes clear, is not only interested in the importance of importance, but the importance of the most important. Thus, we are confronted with human greatness. “Human greatness,” he notes, “is the height of human importance, where the best that humans can do is tested, and it is the work of great individuals. The great Tocqueville—and I refuse to give a lecture on politics without mentioning his name—alluded to himself and his favorite readers as ‘the true friends of liberty and human greatness.’ Somehow liberty and human greatness go together.” I have no doubt about Tocqueville’s greatness, or his attachment to liberty. But when a certain understanding of liberty becomes the foundation of a political theory, perhaps it is necessary to look at the disagreement that exists among theorists and democratic statesmen.

  Tocqueville understood liberty as the highest good of democratic society. It stands in uneasy tension with equality, a providentially or historically fated fact that is a product of the taste for general ideas that arise in post-Christian democratic societies. Thus, although the desire for equality and the passion for uniformity of social conditions accompany democracy, equality is compatible with freedom or despotism. The greatest danger to liberty arises as a result of the unification of governmental and social or administrative centralization. Therefore, the fate that awaits democratic man is either the preservation of local and individual liberty or the establishment of administrative despotism.2 The desire for equality of conditions accelerates the process of individual isolation and the
subsequent rationalization of human life.3 Therefore, it is not equality but the passion for liberty that must be nurtured and preserved. Thus, Tocqueville believed freedom is the closest thing to a principle of nature or, more specifically, of humanity. Consequently, it is the defense of freedom that becomes the fundamental problem of democratic times.4 Tocqueville did not understand the idea of equality, as the American Founders had, in philosophic terms, as a political principle derived from nature and theoretical reason. In fact, Tocqueville seems to have minimized the importance of theory; his explanation rests upon a fundamental change in social conditions that leads to theories that seem to be by-products of social change. Similarly, Tocqueville’s understanding of freedom is not the same as the earlier tradition, either philosophic or religious. The older philosophic and religious traditions and the American Founders understood liberty as subordinate to the moral law (made manifest through reason or revelation). It presupposed the necessity of subordinating passion, or will, to rational limits.5 In the older view, it is nature and reason, or God’s revelation, that established and discerned the limits upon human freedom.

  Tocqueville’s view of equality must be understood in terms of providence, or history, as a general idea that shapes and takes its shape in democratic times. If the democratization of society leads to equality of conditions or centralization, there can be no natural beneficial order that is intelligible through the use of human reason or the comprehension of natural human equality. The idea of equality therefore cannot be rooted in the laws of nature or nature’s God. For that reason, the principle of equality cannot serve as the ground of political justice. Rather, for Tocqueville, man’s humanity is established in the exercise of freedom or free will over the course of time or history. Nonetheless, the outcome of the use of man’s freedom is dependent upon the earlier use of his freedom and is therefore always in doubt.6 Historical circumstances, it seems, will determine whether equality is compatible with freedom or despotism. In order for freedom to become the ground of justice, self-interest, individual will, or desire, must be rationalized by being generalized.7 Nonetheless, the will of each individual remains as the irreducible ground of freedom. Consequently, as Strauss has indicated, for Rousseau, freedom becomes “a higher good than life.”

  In fact, Strauss goes on about Rousseau, he tends to identify freedom with virtue or with goodness. He says that freedom is obedience to the law which one has given to one’s self. This means, in the first place, that not merely obedience to the law but legislation itself must originate in the individual. It means, secondly, that freedom is not so much either the condition or the consequence of virtue as virtue itself. What is true of virtue can also be said of goodness, which Rousseau distinguished from virtue: freedom is identical with goodness; to be free, or to be one’s self, is to be good—this is one meaning of his thesis that man is by nature good. Above all, he suggests that the traditional definition of man be replaced by a new definition according to which not rationality but freedom is the specific distinction of man.8 Tocqueville’s understanding of freedom is not substantially different from that of Rousseau. The reconciliation of the individual and the general will is the fundamental problem of politics. That reconciliation is only possible when freedom is exercised at the level of local or parochial institutions.9 Only there is it possible for the individual to abstract from his particular interests in a manner compatible with the interest of the community. Freedom understood in this way cannot be subordinate to the moral law; it becomes the foundation of the moral law. Indeed, as Strauss suggested, with reference to Rousseau, “the ultimate outcome of this attempt was the substitution of freedom for virtue or the view that it is not virtue which makes man free but freedom which makes man virtuous.”10

  It is not surprising that for Tocqueville every political order must be judged from the point of view of its capacity to defend individual, or local, liberty, which is the foundation of virtue and justice. As Leo Strauss subsequently noted, it was Rousseau who thought it “necessary to abandon altogether the attempt to find the basis of right in nature, in human nature. And Rousseau seemed to have shown an alternative. For he had shown that what is characteristically human is not the gift of nature, but is the outcome of what man did, or was forced to do, in order to overcome or to change nature: man’s humanity is the product of the historical process.”11 Consequently, it is providence or history, not nature, that enabled man to see himself as what he is or may become. For Rousseau and Tocqueville, freedom, or individual freedom, or will, becomes and remains the indissoluble ground of virtue. The political problem for both is one of reconciling the individual and the general will.12 It is free will, not reason, that distinguished man from the animals.13 If history or perfectibility, not nature, had determined what man is capable of, then free will, not reason, is the distinctive characteristic of man, as that which separated him from the animals.14 If the law of reason was severed from the law of nature, a new foundation for rationality and morality had to be established. It was to be found in the passionate and self-interested awareness of the fact that the rights of each depend upon the recognition of the rights of all. Or the will of the individual, in order to become legitimized, must be generalized. Again, it was Rousseau who provided the analytical framework for the understanding of will as the foundation of a new law of reason and morality.15 “Rousseau may be said to have indicated the character of such a law of reason,” Strauss suggested, “by his teaching concerning the general will, by a teaching which can be regarded as the outcome of the attempt to find a ‘realistic’ substitute for the traditional natural law.”16 It is the recognition in all others of the same right that one claims for one’s self; all others necessarily take an effective interest in the recognition of their rights, whereas no one, or but a few, take an effective interest in human perfection of other men. This being the case, my desire transforms itself into a rational desire by being “generalized” (i.e., by being conceived as the content of a law that binds all members of society equally); a desire that survives the test of “generalization” is, by this very fact, proved to be rational and hence just.17 Nonetheless, Tocqueville’s historical analysis, unlike that of those thinkers who were influenced by Kant and Hegel, still seemed to place a premium on the importance of practical reason, or prudence, in human affairs. His concern with the practical and political led one observer, Marvin Zetterbaum, to suggest that “Tocqueville was in revolt against those of his predecessors who had looked on political things in an abstract way.”18

  Yet, his new political science may have conceded too much to fate or History. In denying the authority and primacy of theoretical or metaphysical reason, the autonomy of practical reason is wholly undermined. Prudence, as well as common sense, is without a theoretical defense. In such circumstances, no political science could establish a viable defense against the forces of History. Any moderate or constitutional regime based upon an understanding of nature and reason would be wholly disarmed. Once the historical conditions, which sustained a view of equality compatible with liberty, were transformed, equality itself would become a principle of despotism. After the transformation, prudence could provide no further guidance for a political defense of individual freedom.19 Indeed, in the subsequent history of political thought, no such defense was attempted. In fact, just the opposite occurred. In Hegel and his successors, rational or bureaucratic rule—or the rule of organized intelligence—would replace individual freedom and self-rule in civil society. Civil associations would become professional associations, like the American Political Science Association (APSA). Furthermore, the later historicists, such as Hegel and Marx, demanded a reconciliation of the individual and general will, which required the unification of the social and political, the public and private, making citizenship in the rational state the ground of freedom and virtue. Tocqueville denied that such a reconciliation is possible because he believed that the will, like freedom, is essentially private or individual. Therefore, the defense of human f
reedom would require a defense of individual and local liberty. Only a small democratic community could prevent the centralization of administration and the rationalization of society.

  If Leo Strauss is right, it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who originated the new philosophy of freedom. It is no doubt the case that the new philosophy of freedom paved the way for Hegel’s philosophy of History. Tocqueville was in nearly full agreement with Rousseau’s philosophy of freedom. Nonetheless, he would not acquiesce in the Hegelian attempt to rationalize will in a manner that would transcend the particular and individual. He did not believe that a new ground of positive freedom could be established on the basis of citizenship in the rational state. However, like Hegel, he agreed that history was moving almost inevitably toward universalizing rights of man (equality and liberty). Furthermore, he agreed that Christianity had provided the moral foundation for the democratic, or rational, state. However, whereas Hegel regarded the rational state as a kind of secular deity, and bureaucracy as the embodiment of rationality, Tocqueville saw it as the end of freedom and the beginning of a new kind of despotism. Tocqueville’s defense of freedom was a defense of the private and particular elements of individual will. He did not think it possible for man to universalize, or rationalize, the will. He thought it was impossible to do so in a manner that was compatible with freedom. In other words, he was not persuaded, as Hegel was, that the historical process is rational.