of his warnings about administrative centralization have chilled the hearts of many American readers, however, especially during the past half century.
But Tocqueville’s views about centralization are far more complicated than this brief summary. First, his distinction between governmental and administrative centralization was weak and never worked
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effectively.8 Tocqueville himself knew this and wrote: “The permanent tendency of [nations whose social state is democratic] is to concentrate all governmental power in the hands of the single power that directly represents the people.… Now, when the same power is already vested with all the attributes of government, it is highly difficult for it not to try to get into the details of administration … and it hardly ever fails to find eventually the opportunity to do so.”9 So the two centralizations were really inseparable; when an instrument or branch of government, claiming to represent the people, has sufficient power, it cannot resist the temptation to apply it more widely and in more precise ways. After 1835, as he drafted the second part of his book, the distinction disappeared from Tocqueville’s thinking and writing.
Second, Tocqueville was not opposed to centralization as such. On the contrary, in Democracy and elsewhere, he argued forcefully for the benefits of centralization for certain purposes. In some of his working papers, he asserted that administrative centralization, within limits, is a necessary fact in modern societies, arguing that great national enterprises, essential to the public good, required a centralized state. He called on the state actively to support, and even to fund, academic and scientific societies; such support would assure continuing research in the theoretical sciences and in other fields not attractive to the immediate, often shortsighted interests of democratic society. The Americans, he noted, were so decentralized administratively and so afraid of centralization that they did not know some of the advantages of centralization.10
In one draft fragment, with the title “Unity, centralization” and dated March 7, 1838, he wrote: “However animated you are against unity and the governmental unity that is called centralization, you cannot nonetheless deny that unity and centralization are the most powerful means to do quickly, energetically, and in a given place, very
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great things. That reveals one of the reasons why in democratic centuries centralization and unity are loved so much.”11 In another draft, he declared: “Contained within certain limits, centralization is a necessary fact, and I add that it is a fact about which we must be glad. A strong and intelligent central power is one of the first political necessities in centuries of equality. Acknowledge it boldly.”12
Of course, he also warned that the state or central power must not act alone. Tocqueville had noticed that in the United States “internal improvements” often combined private and governmental (local, state, and federal) support. The Americans, Tocqueville realized, had developed a mixed system for major economic undertakings.13 By combining public and private involvement, they accomplished wonders.14 In his drafts, he argued that if the administration in France became deeply involved in great industrial enterprises, it had to be checked by the legislature and by the courts. A system of balance was required.15 The real issue, according to Tocqueville, is not how to bar state participation but where and how to draw the limits of state participation.16
In the 1840 text he forcefully declared: “It is at the very same time necessary and desirable that the central power that directs a democratic people be active and powerful. It is not a matter of making it weak or indolent, but only of preventing it from abusing its agility and strength.”17
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Excessive focus on the dangers of centralization as such, and especially on administrative centralization, has often blinded readers not only to Tocqueville’s praise for what he described as the benefits of centralization but also to his more fundamental concern about democratic societies. Although Tocqueville harshly condemned bureaucratic centralization, his broader message involved the danger of any consolidated power. In his book, he described a long series of possible democratic tyrannies: the majority, the mass, public opinion, the legislature, the military leader, one man alone, the bureaucracy, the state, or even the manufacturing aristocracy or some faction. By claiming and attempting to exercise concentrated and unchecked power, each threatened liberty. Here was the heart of his warnings about democratic despotisms.
In the 1835 text he declared:
So I think that a social power superior to all others must always be placed somewhere, but I believe liberty is in danger when this power encounters no obstacle that can check its course and give it time to moderate itself.
Omnipotence in itself seems to me something bad and dangerous. Its exercise seems to me beyond the power of man, whoever he may be; and I see only God who can, without danger, be all powerful, because his wisdom and his justice are always equal to his power. So there is no authority on earth so respectable in itself, or vested with a right so sacred, that I would want to allow it to act without control or to dominate without obstacles. So when I see the right and the ability to do everything granted to whatever power, whether called people or king, democracy or aristocracy, whether exercised in a monarchy or a republic, I say: the seed of tyranny is there and I try to go and live under other laws.18
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To preserve liberty in democratic societies, Tocqueville believed strongly that all power has to be limited or hedged in by various restraints, both formal and informal. Unchecked power was dangerous no matter where it was located. For Tocqueville, decentralization was simply one of the ways to spread power as widely as possible.
Even this brief overview demonstrates that beneath the major democratic dangers that worried Tocqueville was an underlying moral concern. Tocqueville was most troubled by the potential moral impact of materialism, individualism, and consolidated power. As a moralist, Tocqueville believed that the worst democratic dangers undermined human responsibility, shrank the human spirit, and diminished the human soul.
The Remedies
For this trinity of dangers—materialism, individualism, and consolidated or unchecked power—what were the remedies? The continuity of remedies for democratic ills that Tocqueville offered his readers in 1835 and 1840 is one of the great evidences of the unity between the two halves of Democracy. Tocqueville wrote about the art and the habits of liberty. By the art of liberty, he meant primarily the legal, constitutional, and institutional mechanisms that mark a society. A people and their lawmakers can shape laws and institutions in ways that lessen democratic dangers and foster liberty. One of the features that Tocqueville admired most about the United States, for example, was the way in which power was scattered or spread about; he often used the word éparpiller when describing American institutional and legal arrangements. In particular, he had in mind decentralization (especially local liberties and associations); the federal system (including checks and balances among the branches of government); liberty of the press; and individual civil and political rights. Many of the most important lessons learned by Tocqueville in the New World republic involved key legal and structural mechanisms for moderating democracy and avoiding its worst dangers.
By the habits of liberty, Tocqueville meant something closely related to mores of a certain kind, especially inherited ideas, behaviors, habits,
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and values, such as the spirit of association, the spirit of religion, a sense of justice, and a grasp of interest well understood. In his book, he consistently stressed the restraints on power that arose from mores in America as well as from legal and institutional arrangements. He also insisted that the habits of liberty were more powerful and enduring, more essential and reliable, than the art of liberty.
