Freedom and Equality in Democracy in America

One can imagine an extreme point at which freedom and equality touch each other and intermingle. Let me suppose that all citizens concur in the government and that each has an equal right to concur in it. Then with none differing from those like him, no one will be able to exercise a tyrannical power; men will be perfectly free because they will all be entirely equal; and they will all be perfectly equal because they will be entirely free. This is the ideal toward which democratic peoples tend. (Democracy in America, II, ii, 1)

With their linkage tracing directly back to the founding

documents of the American and French revolutions of the

eighteenth century, the concepts of freedom and equality are

so embedded in democratic doctrine as to seem necessarily

conjoined, and at the very least, compatible. Jefferson

started the Declaration of Independence with the claim of a

universal birthright to equality and the inalienable rights

to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The French

Revolution enshrined “liberté, egalité et fraternité” as the

founding principles of the republic, and its Declaration of

the Rights of Man and Citizen, stated in the first article

that “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.”

Recognizing their interconnection, Tocqueville traces the

contingent, if not the necessary, relationship between the

concepts:

Equality, which renders men independent of one another, makes them contract the habit and taste of following their will alone in their particular actions. This entire independence, which they enjoy continually vis-à-vis their equals and in the practice of private life, disposes them toconsider all authority with the eye of a malcontent and soonsuggests to them the idea and love of political freedom.1

However, while explaining their connection, Tocqueville was

among the first political theorists to recognize that

freedom and equality are not necessarily conjoined or even

compatible, that they coexist uneasily and that the tension

between them is a fundamental source of differences in what

democracy stands for and can become. The complicated

conceptual relationship between freedom and equality has

even led to interpretive controversy about Tocqueville

himself. It has been suggested that “Tocqueville’s larger

effort [was] to give intellectual coherence to the joint

pursuit of equality and liberty in the modern world.”2 It has

1 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 639.2 Olivier Zunz, “Review of Sheldon Wolin’s Tocqueville Between Two Worlds,” Reviews in American History, 30.4 (2002): 564. Emphasis added.

2

also been suggested that Tocqueville was “mainly concerned

with the threat that equality – political, social, and economic –

posed for political liberty and personal independence.”3

This paper will assess Tocqueville’s concepts of

freedom and equality. It will argue that Tocqueville was

deeply concerned with the ways that equality debases

political discourse and culture, and that he feared

limitations on political freedom as one consequence of this

debasement. However, the focus of the discussion will be

Tocqueville’s recognition of the conceptual tension between

freedom and equality, and his claim that the viability of

democracy requires that they be maintained in equilibrium. I

will argue that Tocqueville believed that any imbalance

between them can lead to the unraveling of democracy,

resulting, on the one hand, in the ascendency of a moneyed

aristocracy that destroys equality, or, on the other, the

development of a centralized state apparatus that usurps

political sovereignty from a passive citizenry. Because

Tocqueville viewed the latter possibility as a loathsome

3 Robert Dahl, A Preface to Economic Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 2. Emphasis added.

3

threat to freedom, he has been appropriated by the political

right as one its forebears. While this is amply justified, I

will conclude by suggesting that while Tocqueville regarded

these two endpoints of democracy’s decline as mutually

exclusive, they might now be viewed in combination, and

that, by doing so, one can claim that Tocqueville provided

the foundation for a radical critique of modern American

democracy.

To introduce and frame the assessment of Tocqueville,

it is useful first to consider more recent discussions of

freedom and equality and the role they have played in the

ongoing argument between the political right and left. The

tension between them has derived largely from the multiple

meanings attached to equality. In democratic doctrine, while

all men are endowed with equal rights, they are not endowed

with equal abilities and ambitions, and, as those abilities and

ambitions are freely exercised in an environment of equal

opportunity, it is certain that there will not be equal

distribution of rewards. In brief, freedom enables those with

great ability to acquire more power and property than those

4

with less, thus undermining equality. Milton Friedman, among

others, has pointed to the distinction between equality of

opportunity and equality of outcome.4 Embedded in equality of

opportunity are the core democratic ideals that all persons

are equal under the law, that all have equal rights to

participate within the political process, and all are

equally free to pursue their private interests provided that

they do not interfere with the freedom of others. The demand

for equality of outcome, on the other hand, is a normative

concept driving government toward assuring that all

individuals are entitled to an equal share of rewards. This

objective has occasionally been made explicit, perhaps most

notably by President Johnson in his commencement address at

Howard University in 1965, when he proposed the policy of

race-based preferences:

It is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates…. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, notjust equality as a right and a theory but equality as a factand equality as a result.5

4 Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 195.5 President Lyndon Johnson, Commencement Address at Howard University, June 4, 1965. http://www.hpol.org/lbj/civil-rights/. Emphasis added.

5

This opening salvo started the forty year debate over

affirmative action which has twice come before the Supreme

Court, and is representative of the fundamental divide in

American politics over the meaning of equality and freedom.6

The tension between the putative moral desirability of

social equality against the consequence of unequal outcomes

deriving from the also morally desirable free exercise of

individual rights has energized a fundamental ongoing

political debate about the nature of democracy. The

advocates of freedom’s primacy trace their lineage to

classical liberalism, which, in response to twentieth

century totalitarianism, mutated into modern conservatism;

the advocates of equality derive from socialism and welfare

state theorists like T.H. Marshall and Karl Polanyi, and now

associate themselves with some form of the concept of

“social justice.”

The seminal modern theorist of the libertarian right is

Friedrich Hayek, who laid much of the groundwork for free

6 See, for example, George Will, “Freedom vs. Equality” Washington Post, February 1, 2004. “Today, as for two centuries, the left-right divide isdefined by different valuations of equality and freedom.”

6

market economists qua political ideologues like Milton

Friedman, popular culture icons like Ayn Rand, and

libertarian philosophers like Robert Nozick. In The

Constitution of Liberty, Hayek stated social inequality is

inevitable in a system promoting freedom, with equality

under the law:

It is just not true that “all men are born equal” … If we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position; and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are, therefore, not only different but are in conflict with one another; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time. The equality before the law which freedom requires leads to material inequality.7

Accordingly, Hayek insisted that to avoid the selectivity of

“discriminatory coercion” by government interference in the

marketplace, individual freedom must be entirely

unregulated, that political and legal rights must be applied

without regard to social distinctions, and that any

redistributionist policy is impossible to formulate in a

non-arbitrary fashion, and is bound to fail in any case. For

government to favor one group over another in the effort to

7 Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 87.

7

attain equal outcomes requires the bestowal of privilege,

which is a direct violation of democracy’s founding

principle that all citizens are equal under the law. Hayek

identified the essence of the rule of law as the denial of

all privilege.8

Against the doctrinaire claims of the modern right, the

left regards the notion of equality of opportunity as, at

best, a useful theoretical construct to define individual

rights, but as chimerical in a social landscape which is

already riven with inequalities based on class, income, race

and sex that have nothing to do with individual aptitudes.

For the left, social justice demands that government

intervene in the marketplace to assure that equality of

opportunity is more than merely theoretically available to

all individuals, and, at least, to meliorate the inequality

of outcomes.

The [political, legal and social] structure contains varioussocial positions and men born into different positions have different expectations of life determined by economic and social circumstances. These are especially deep inequalities. [They are] pervasive, they affect man’s initial chances in life; yet they cannot possibly be

8 Friedrich Hayek, Road to Serfdom (Chicago. University of Chicago Press: 1944), Ch VI.

8

justified by an appeal to the notions of merit or desert. Itis these inequalities, presumably inevitable in the basic structure of any society, to which the principles of social justice must in the first instance apply.9

The recognition that actual human beings do not begin on a

level playing field in the state of nature, that outcomes

are not purely determined by the competition between

individuals with varying personal attributes, requires that

government impose limits and regulations on the exercise of

individual freedom. Further, in the context of social

inequality, it is suggested that the availability of freedom

itself is unequally distributed. Negative liberties can be

appreciated by those who are well off, but have little

urgency for those whose daily lives are mired in a struggle

for the basic necessities of survival.10 In this view,

freedom does not come to us from the heavenly realm of

metaphysics; its source is in earthly politics: Those who

have power and wealth can exercise their freedom and get

more, but for those who don’t, well, it’s a mere

9 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 7.10 See, for example, Sanford Levinson, Constitutional Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) and Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1989)

9

abstraction. Government intervention is necessary to

equalize opportunities and improve the chances for equal

outcomes; in doing so, it assures that freedom itself is

equally available to all citizens.

Steeped in both Enlightenment philosophy and an

empirical effort to discern the reality of America’s (and

France’s) social and political structure, Tocqueville

anticipated this argument by recognizing that freedom and

equality are competing values. Of course, he was not the

first to address the issues of inequality and freedom. The

origin of inequality prompted Rousseau’s Second Discourse.

Hobbes and Locke argued that all men are equal in the state

of nature, and that government itself was founded by a

freely entered covenant to design laws and establish an

authority to protect individual security and freedom. While

the English social contract philosophers never confronted

the potential contradictions between equality and freedom,

the issue was crucial to the founders of American democracy.

In trying to implement Locke’s principles, the framers of

the Constitution were forced to grapple with the meaning of

10

equality, and especially how it coexists with property

rights in a free society. In Federalist 10, Madison recognizes

the problem in his discussion on political factions. He

identifies the “most common and durable source” of factions

as “the various and unequal distribution of property,” and

claims that this unequal distribution is a result of

“unequal faculties.”

The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rightsof property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into differentinterests and parties.11

While the regulation of competing property interests,

especially between those who have and those who do not,

“forms the principle task of modern legislation,”12 Madison

denounces the view that the principle of equality requires

that government strive toward leveling the distribution of

property; such “pure democracies” that have made such an

11 James Madison, “Federalist 10,” The Federalist Papers. Isaac Kramnick, ed. (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 124.12 Ibid., 124.

11

attempt “have been spectacles of turbulence” and have been

driven by “theoretic politicians, who… have erroneously

supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in

their political rights, they would at the same time, be

perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions,

their opinions, and their passions.”13 Madison goes on to

declare that a redistribution of wealth, whether it be “an

abolition of debts [or] an equal distribution of property,”

is an “improper or wicked project.”14

While Madison acknowledged that inequalities of wealth

are a source of political factionalism and in need of

government attention, his primary concern was to protect

property rights from a belief in equality that could boil

over into redistributionist egalitarianism. Tocqueville’s

attention, on the other hand, was mainly drawn to the

interplay of equality with political rights and freedoms.

And in this, Tocqueville turned the issue on its head:

whereas Madison feared that the demand to correct social

inequalities would erode property rights, Tocqueville feared

13 Ibid., 126.14 Ibid., 128.

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that an actual pre-existing equality of conditions,

reinforced by America’s founding ideology claiming the

primacy of equality, could undermine political rights. For

Tocqueville, the issue was how to sustain political rights

and freedoms in a social climate characterized by an

equality of conditions.

Tocqueville freely uses the terms ‘equality’ and

‘equality of conditions’ throughout Democracy in America. In

his discussion of equality, Tocqueville does not seem to

have been particularly interested in making theoretical

advances beyond the Enlightenment inheritance. He uses

‘equality’ in the theoretical context to describe the

founding and most fundamental principle of democracy, a

state of governance in which there are no classes given

privilege by law, and in which all citizens share in the

same rights, obligations and opportunities. Most crucially,

equality requires that there be no social division between

aristocrats and commoners; such a division is absolutely

intolerable in democracy.

13

I think that democratic peoples have a natural taste for freedom; left to themselves, they seek it, they love it, andthey will see themselves parted from it only with sorrow. But for equality they have an ardent, insatiable, eternal, invincible passion; they want equality in freedom, and, if they cannot get it, they still want it in slavery. They willtolerate poverty, enslavement, barbarism, but they will not tolerate aristocracy.15

Tocqueville did not pursue the philosophical meaning and

implications of equality. Rather, his interest is in the

social and political consequences of equality, as it rooted

itself in America’s mores and political institutions, and

the implications for France and Europe.

To convey the encompassing presence of equality

throughout American culture, Tocqueville uses “equality of

conditions” as the expression of his empirical discovery.

With America embodying equality of conditions in its actual

political and social life, he was not merely describing the

dialectical extensions of equality within the realm of

theory; he was able to describe the consequences of equality

15 Ibid., 482. See also 52: “It is not that peoples whose social state isdemocratic naturally scorn freedom; on the contrary, they have an instinctive taste for it. But freedom is not the principal and continuous object of their desire; what they love with an eternal love is equality…. Nothing can satisfy them without equality, and they would sooner consent to perish than to lose it.”

14

in the real world.16 Equality of conditions, though used

throughout Democracy without rigorous definition, was

clearly meant to describe an empirically identifiable social

environment. Early in the Introduction to Democracy, the

term makes its first appearance in the remark that he sees

the same “equality of conditions” advancing in Europe,

albeit “without having reached [the] extreme limits”17 that

it had in the United States, in which it was “almost

complete.”18 In America, equality of conditions is

pervasive, not only at the cultural level, but even in

personal aptitudes.

America… presents the strangest phenomenon in its social state. Men show themselves to be more equal in their fortunes and in their intelligence or, in other terms, more equally strong than they are in any country in the world andthan they have been in any century of which history keeps a memory.19

It is notable that Tocqueville extends American equality of

conditions even to the intellect; while acknowledging God-

given intellectual inequality, he claims that

16 Ibid., 13. Tocqueville states that his original intent for the second volume was to “paint the influence that equality of conditions” and democracy exert over other aspects of American life.17 Democracy in America, 3.18 Ibid., 12.19 Ibid., 52.

15

“it is not only fortunes that are equal in America; up to a

certain point, equality extends to intelligence itself”20 as

a near-genetic inheritance from the Puritans.21 But

intellect notwithstanding, it is unmistakable that for

Tocqueville, equality of conditions was mainly meant to

suggest social and economic equality:

Between these two extremes [the very poor and the very rich]is found an innumerable multitude of almost similar men who,without being precisely either rich or poor, possess enough goods to desire order and do not have enough of them to excite envy.22

The continuity of this vast middle class was assured by

bountiful natural resources, by the industrious work ethic

of the American people, by the prospect of westward

expansion for anyone whose inheritance was too small, and by

the security of being situated between two oceans.

To the extent that Tocqueville saw equality as a threat

to freedom, his perspective was thus very different from

that of Hayek and other heirs of classical liberalism. For

Hayek, the risk to freedom came from government intervention

20 Ibid., 50.21 Ibid., 267. “I saw the whole destiny of America contained in the firstPuritan who landed on its shores.” See also 292.22 Ibid., 607. See also 483-4 and 601.

16

to assure general equality, and the consequent disruption of

the free markets and individual economic freedom, which for

him was the necessary condition for political freedom.23 For

Tocqueville, equality is already established in America; it

has happened organically as result of the founding mores of

the Puritans within a land of plenty, not through government

meddling or suppression of expansive property rights. In

fact, the right to property is actually assured by America’s

equality of conditions:

Why in America, country of democracy par excellence, does noone make heard those complaints about property in general that often ring out in Europe? Is there a need to say it? –it is that in America there are no proletarians. Each one, having a particular good to defend, recognizes the right of property in principle.24

For Tocqueville, the issue is not about the coercive and

illiberal methods used to attain equality. His question is

whether equality is a morally desirable end point because of

the coercive and illiberal consequences that he sees flowing

from it. For Tocqueville, those consequences reach mainly

into the political and cultural realms, and barely touch on

23 See, for example, Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago. University of Chicago Press: 1962), 4.24 Democracy in America, 228.

17

the economic. The threats brought on by equality were two-

fold, and Tocqueville famously named them ‘tyranny of the

majority’ and ‘individualism.’

I will not examine these concepts in detail here, but

rather, for present purposes, confine the discussion to

demonstrating their foundations in equality, their threats

to political freedom, and a brief review of Tocqueville’s

notions on how they are meliorated and balanced. Tocqueville

clearly recognizes that majority rule as the doctrine of

democratic decision-making is grounded in the concept of

popular sovereignty and political equality. He refers to the

“moral empire of the majority” as the “the theory of

equality applied to intellects,”25 suggesting the wisdom of

the preponderance of the masses exceeds that of a solitary

individual, and further “that the interests of the greatest

number ought to be preferred to those of the few.”26 With

this utilitarian explanation, Tocqueville states that the

rule of the majority permits no privilege, reinforcing its

basis in equality. Yet, he fears that because “the empire of

25 Ibid., 236.26 Ibid., 237.

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the majority is absolute” in democracy “there is nothing

that resists it.”27 With majority rule fostering conformity

and intimidating any deviating opinion, the consequences for

freedom are devastating: “I do not know any country where,

in general, less independence of mind and genuine freedom of

discussion reign than in America.”28 He flatly declares that

“there is no freedom of mind in America,29 and that, as much

as the democratic social state favors the very intellectual

freedom and human spirit that broke “all the shackles that

classes or men formerly imposed on it,” it will whither

under the confines of the tight chains of “the general will

of the greatest number.”30 If free thought is put at risk by

the tyranny of the majority, political freedom itself cannot

be viable.

Despite the seemingly unchecked hegemony of the

majority, Tocqueville argues that democracy’s political

self-destruction is not inevitable. Tocqueville details how

the tyranny of the majority can be thwarted by decentralized

27 Ibid., 235.28 Ibid., 244.29 Ibid., 245.30 Ibid., 410.

19

administration, by freedom of association, and by the rule

of law, as embodied by the high status of lawyers and the

jury system which “teaches men the practice of equity” and

“augment[s] the natural enlightenment of the people.”31

Democracy is threatened by a second offspring of

equality, individualism. Tocqueville’s use of this term is

almost counter-intuitive to its modern connotation of

expressive uniqueness and an ethic of self-interest oriented

toward economic gain, political power and social status. For

Tocqueville, individualism represents withdrawal and

isolation from the surrounding community; he places it in

opposition to the organic community composed of feudal class

distinctions and defined social roles: “Individualism is of

democratic origin, and it threatens to develop as conditions

become equal.”32 Far from characterizing the egoistic

activities of the player in a free market, individualism is

grounded in an equality of conditions in which actors,

unable to attain wealth or power over their peers, remove

themselves from the public sphere and focus their activities

31 Ibid., 262.32 Ibid., 483.

20

solely to assure the sufficiency of themselves and their

families. Tocqueville “reproach[es] equality ” for

“absorbing [men] entirely in the search for permitted

enjoyments.”33 Democracy is put at risk as its citizens fail

to fulfill their civic responsibilities.

As with the tyranny of the majority, Tocqueville is

quick to point out the ways in which individualism has been

contained in America. Indeed, for Tocqueville, the threat of

individualism seems entirely a European concern, resulting

from the revolutionary breakdown of the ancien regime’s social

structure. Americans, having been “born equal instead of

becoming so,”34 have “combated the individualism to which

equality gives birth with freedom, and they have defeated

it.”35 It is specifically the freedom of the press and

voluntary associations that have countered individualism,

but the victory is really grounded in the mores and the

morals of Americans; at the public level, American society

has been infused with a Rousseauian drive to determine the

33 Ibid., 509.34 Ibid., 485.35 Ibid,. 486. Emphasis added.

21

general will, and at the private level, by the universal

acceptance of an ethic of self-interest well understood:36

The free institutions that the inhabitants of the United States possess and the political rights of which they make so much use recall to each citizen constantly… that he livesin society. One is occupied with the general interest at first by necessity and then by choice; what was calculation becomes instinct; and by dint of working for the good of one’s fellow citizens, one finally picks up the habit and taste of serving them.37

As his discussions of the tyranny of the majority and

individualism demonstrate, Tocqueville’s enthusiasm for

democracy is hardly uncritical. Each is identified as a

potential perversion of the principle of equality residing

at the foundation of democracy, and yet, each can be averted

by the legal and political institutions, and by the social

mores, that democracy erects and fosters to defend freedom:

“And I say that to combat the evils that equality can

produce there is only one efficacious remedy: it is

political freedom.”38 Tocqueville does not regard freedom as

a distinctive characteristic of democracy,39 and is the 36 Ibid., 501.37 Ibid., 488.38 Ibid., 488.39 “Freedom has manifested itself to men in different times and in different forms; it is not attached exclusively to one social state, andone encounters it elsewhere than in democracies. It therefore cannot form the distinctive characteristic of democratic centuries.” Ibid., 490.

22

lesser of two “unequal things”40 vis-à-vis equality, but it is

clear that without it, democratic equality could become

intolerable.

But what of freedom? Did Tocqueville foresee any

possibility that there could be “too much” freedom, or that

the exercise of freedom could undermine democracy or change

it intolerably? In the course of discussing the bustling

commerce and boundless resources of America, Tocqueville

suggests that it is nearly inconceivable that freedom could

have anything but beneficial effects:

New needs are not to be feared [in America], since all needsare satisfied without trouble: one must not be afraid of giving rise to too many passions, since all passions find aneasy and salutary nourishment; one cannot make men too free there, because they are almost never tempted to make bad useof freedom.41

While Tocqueville’s America is characterized repeatedly by

an equality of conditions, it is also characterized by

citizen involvement, voluntarism, an active (if flawed)

press, and local self-rule. In the economic sphere, American

freedom is expressed in entrepreneurship and commerce,

acquisitiveness, the drive for wealth. America is the 40 Ibid., 480.41 Ibid., 272.

23

cauldron of unimpeded economic freedom as Madison and

Hamilton had imagined, yet still the predominantly agrarian

economy envisioned by Jefferson. Thus was America described

in 1835 when the first volume of Democracy in America was

published.

In the few years that intervened before the publication

of the second volume, one must infer that Tocqueville

noticed a shifting American economy or was influenced by the

rapid industrialization of England. The first volume has a

persistent agrarian fixation,42 and Tocqueville at one point

asserts that Americans “do not cultivate the science of

industry.”43 Yet, in the second volume, a chapter title

announces that “All Americans Incline Toward Industrial

Professions.”44 Tocqueville continues to claim that equality

of conditions prevails, and has now resulted in a body of

men who are “active, enlightened, free, at ease, full of

desires,”45 but not rich enough to live without income. The

42 Tocqueville even suggests that urbanization is a direct threat to American democracy because of the “low people” that inhabit its cities. See ibid., 266, note 1.43 Ibid., 289.44 Ibid, II,ii,19.45 Ibid., 526.

24

entrepreneurial spirit of such men cannot be satisfied in

agriculture, for which they have a “distaste.” They are

driven to commerce and industry. In a footnote, Tocqueville

asserts that equality is one of the causes of this desire

for wealth, but the argument seems half-hearted and is

unconvincing.46 Whatever the cause of the urge for wealth,

it is the freedom of these “free” men and a cultural

approval of their willingness to take risks that enables

this class of commercial and industrial entrepreneurs to

thrive.

The final chapter of Part II of the second volume

cannot be anticipated from the preceding narrative. It

describes the effects of an economy undergoing a major shift

from an agricultural base to a capital-intensive industrial

base directed by a new science of management. Within the

context of a bountiful continent and an agrarian economy,

freedom and equality could coexist.47 Yet, placed in a

setting managed according to the division of labor promoted

46 Ibid., 527., note 147 See Ibid., I,ii,9.

25

by the “new axioms of industrial science,”48 the logic of

unregulated economic freedom, combined with the

characteristic American drive to acquisition and wealth,

trumps social equality as the naturally gifted gain wealth

and power. Moreover, this spiraling economic and social

logic can feed on itself causing still greater inequality as

wages are depressed,49 and ultimately undermines democracy’s

founding principle of equality. A new class of workers is

created in these enterprises, and they are intellectually

stunted, imprisoned in their factories:

An industrial theory more powerful than mores and laws attaches him to a trade and often to a place that he cannot quit. It has assigned him a certain position in a society which he cannot leave. In the midst of universal movement, it has made him immobile.50

This worker, now no more than a “brute,” is contrasted with

the “administrator of a vast empire,” the one powerless and

incapable of political participation – in a word, unfree –,

the other now with the commanding presence of aristocracy,

but without the sense of social obligation. Can anything

prevent this from occurring? Tocqueville is silent. Can 48 Ibid., 530.49 See ibid., II, iii, 7.50 Ibid., 530.

26

anything balance its consequences? Tocqueville is, again,

silent.

The conclusion of Part II is stunning. After presenting

a thoroughgoing examination of every aspect of America’s and

democracy’s mores, legal foundations, culture, institutions

and ideology, after claiming that Americans would prefer

slavery to the loss of equality, Tocqueville discovers a

malign dialectic in the heart of American economic freedom

and finds himself with nowhere to go. Unlike the discussion

of individualism and majority tyranny in which he discussed

their dangers only to immediately show how they can be

contained by other forces, it appears that the prospect of

an industrial aristocracy implementing a “theory more

powerful than mores and laws” left Tocqueville at an

impasse. Moreover, recognizing “the manufacturing

aristocracy that we see rising before our eyes,”51

Tocqueville is not talking about a merely theoretical

possibility; the undermining of democracy by a new

privileged class is already playing out. And yet, while

51 Ibid., 532.

27

perceiving this disastrous outcome, Tocqueville is left

merely to speculate whether this new moneyed aristocracy may

be, on the one hand, “one of the hardest that has appeared

on earth,” or, on the other, may yet be “one of the most

restrained and least dangerous.” Between these two extremes,

Tocqueville seems to have no idea what it will be, and,

ending with a cautionary word about the need to watch this

potential source of “permanent inequality,” he changes the

subject.

Of course, it is possible that Tocqueville did not see

this outcome as disastrous at all. Tocqueville was anything

but uncritically enthusiastic about democracy, and along

with alarms about the excesses of individualism and the

tyranny of the majority, much of his criticism was rooted in

what he believed to have been lost with the collapse of

aristocracy: high cultural and intellectual life, organic

community structures of mutual dependency, the values of

personal loyalty and national glory, a sense of history and

tradition. Perhaps he held out the hope that this

manufacturing aristocracy could reintroduce these salutary

28

qualities into the context of the democratic state.

Tocqueville gives us reason to believe this possibility:

history may yet unwind into a merging of their features.

Strangely, rather than include his remarks in the text of

Democracy, he buried his suggestion in one of the end notes:

Aristocracy of birth and pure democracy are at the two extremities of the social and political state of nations; inthe middle is aristocracy of money; this comes close to aristocracy of birth in that it confers great privileges on a few citizens; it is connected to democracy in that the privileges can be acquired by all in turn; it often forms almost a natural transition between these two things, and one cannot say whether it ends in the reign of aristocratic institutions or whether it is already opening the new era ofdemocracy.52

We have now advanced well beyond the introduction of

Democracy in America in which the providential march of

equality is laying waste to aristocracy. Whether this

transition will conclude in a new “reign of [aristocracy]”

– what we might now call plutocracy – or a “new era of

democracy” – meritocracy – he cannot be sure. But far from

the “religious terror”53 that consumed him as revolutionary

democracy advanced, Tocqueville betrays no alarm regarding

either possibility.52 Ibid., 699.53 Ibid, 7.

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In contrast to Tocqueville’s near indifference to the

vulnerability of democracy to an aristocracy of money, the

final section of Democracy in America is a gloomy meditation on

democracy’s vulnerability to a new form of centralized

power. Tocqueville dismisses the conventional wisdom that

democracy will fly apart, that the centripetal forces of

freedom and equality will destroy the authority of

government and spin society into anarchy. His focus, rather,

is on the opposite possibility, the potential for a

“democratic despotism” in which the tyranny of the majority

and individualism implode to vest all political power under

a centralized administration. Tocqueville plainly identifies

equality as the source of this potential. Speaking

specifically to European democracies, he suggests that “each

step they take toward equality brings them closer to

despotism.”54 This despotism is rooted in a “general apathy,

the fruit of individualism,”55 which we have already learned

“is of democratic origin, and threatens to develop as

54 Ibid., 651.55 Ibid., 704. Emphasis in original.

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conditions become equal.”56 As Tocqueville had pointed to

the individual economic freedom as the source of an

industrial aristocracy rooted in the concentration of

wealth, in these concluding chapters he looks to equality as

the source of a concentration of political power under a

centralized despotism.

Tocqueville foresees a sovereign usurping power from

and dominating the “secondary powers” – guardians of local

autonomy, charities, education, religion – that represent

distributed authority.57 Through taxation and borrowing, it

“centralizes the greatest capital sums in its own hands.”58

Yet, despite this concentration of political and financial

power in the central administration, Tocqueville’s despotism

remains democratic: unlike the classical model of despotism,

people are not oppressed; they go about their business as

equals, working within and enjoying the pleasures of the

state’s economic life. The despot provides security to the

56 Ibid., 483.57 Ibid., 651-3.58 Ibid., 653.

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markets, and citizens pursue their private interests within

the boundaries of predictable rules.

I want to imagine with what new features despotism could be produced in the world; I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is likea stranger to the destiny of all the others…Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes chargeof assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. …Soit is that every day it renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare. …Equality has prepared men for all these things: it has disposed them to tolerate them and often even regard them as a benefit.59

Trying to find a phrase for the degeneration of democratic

equality, Tocqueville claims that he sought “in vain [for]

an expression that exactly reproduces [this] idea,” that

“the old words despotism and tyranny are not suitable,”60

and he finally lands on democratic despotism as his term of

art. But what he seems to have conjured is an updated

version of Hobbes’ Leviathan, a central authority that rules

with the consent of the governed in an established civil

society, but is borne of the surrender of political will and

59 Ibid., 663. Emphasis added. Tocqueville’s five-word characterization ofdemocratic despotism almost seems like a paraphrase of Hobbes’ famous description of life in the state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”60 Ibid., 662.

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participation by a democratic people consumed by apathetic

individualism. Tocqueville’s Leviathan is ruled not by a

king but by “schoolmasters”61 who distract their subjects

from the public arena to the arena of private self-

satisfaction. Rather than arising from an anarchic statue of

nature and being necessitated by the mutual destruction of

unconstrained freedom, this Leviathan, rooted in the

principle of equality, nonetheless acts to “little by little

steal the very use of free will from each citizen.” This is

a state that

does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them… and reduces [the] nation to being nothing morethan a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.62

The government assures that “citizens… enjoy themselves

provided that they think only of enjoying themselves.”63 For

Tocqueville, this “compromise between administrative

despotism and the sovereignty of the people,”64 ultimately

signals nothing less than the death of the potential for

political freedom and self-government, for the “people will 61 Ibid., 662.62 Ibid., 663.63 Ibid., 663.64 Ibid., 664.

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soon become incapable of exercising the great, unique

privilege that remains to them:”

It is in fact difficult to conceive how men who have entirely renounced the habit of directing themselves could succeed at choosing well those who will lead them; and one will not make anyone believe that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever issue from the suffrage of a peopleof servants.65

Just as the workers in the division-of-labor factory economy

are diminished by their daily routine into a permanent

underclass dominated by the industrial aristocracy, so

popular sovereignty and political freedom are hollowed out

and enervated as democratic despotism progressively

forecloses opportunities for the self-government that

characterizes American democracy. In the one instance, the

free market leads to the destruction of equality as an

industrial aristocracy takes power; in the other, individual

freedom is strangled in the tight boundaries of the

democratic despotism based on the concept of equality.

Tocqueville’s dread of democratic despotism makes him a

very sympathetic figure to the American political right,

65 Ibid., 665.

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which has adopted him as one of its founding

theoreticians.66 While Tocqueville’s fears were expressed as

he witnessed the centralizing tendencies of French politics—

tendencies which became fully realized under Louis Napoleon—

his critique is redolent of the kinds of arguments used by

the right against the purported collectivism and suppression

of the individual in socialist ideology. Indeed, for

Tocqueville, socialism, as he came to witness it in 1848,

was repellent, and for these very reasons. In remarks to the

Constituent Assembly, he was scathing in his reaction to the

socialist notion of equality: “Democracy and socialism have

nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the

difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty,

socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”67

As his response to the socialist threat suggests,

Tocqueville was determined to sustain democratic

66 “The analysis of democratic despotism is his supreme achievement as apolitical theorist, a sociologist, a liberal, and a conservative.” Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind (Chicago: Regnery & Co., 1953), 179. Fora more recent example with a neo-con perspective, see the tract by Michael Ledeen, Tocqueville on American Character (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).67 Oeuvres Complet d’Alexis de Tocqueville [1866], IX, 546. Quoted in Friedrich Hayek. The Road to Serfdom, 25.

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institutions in order to foster “equality in liberty.” There

is no formulaic solution to maintaining the delicate

equilibrium of freedom and equality; for Tocqueville, the

balancing act is maintained in part by laws and geography,

but he attributes it most importantly to the “practical

experience of the Americans, to their habits, to their

opinions — in a word, to their mores.”68 Yet, while stating

the primacy of mores, Tocqueville is not offering up simple

cultural determinism; he recognizes that mores themselves

are not immutable; there are forces working from within

democracy as well as from outside, and mores can evolve and

be transformed. In the context of urban industrialization,

he asserts that the new management science can prove more

powerful than democratic mores and can lead to plutocratic

rule by an ascendant industrial aristocracy. Alternatively,

a paternalistic Leviathan might develop when equal citizens,

preoccupied by petty concerns within their personal orbits,

abandon the public sphere and cede their participation in

political life, and their liberty with it. Given the

68 Ibid., 295.

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prospect of the non-democratic outcomes flowing from a

disequilibrium between freedom and equality, Tocqueville

left no ambiguity about which outcome he feared, and which

he preferred:

I believe it is easier to establish an absolute and despoticgovernment in a people where conditions are equal than in any other, and I think that if such a government were once established in a people like this, not only would it oppressmen, but in the long term it would rob each of them of several of the principle attributes of humanity. Despotism therefore appears to me particularly to be dreaded in democratic ages. I would, I think, have loved freedom in alltimes; but I feel inclined to adore it in the time we are in.69

The reasons for the political right to have adopted

Tocqueville as a kindred spirit are plentiful. Surely his

revulsion at nascent socialism would put him at ease in

their company, as would his emphasis on the role of religion

in public life; the civic value of voluntary associations;

the emphasis on federalism; and desirability of local

administrative authority to sustain democracy. One must also

add Tocqueville’s benign regard for a developing industrial

elite and the implication that political freedom is

69 Ibid., 666.

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compatible with an aristocracy of wealth derived from

individual action in the marketplace.

Does Tocqueville offer anything to the left? While he

says nothing that can be pointed to as a foundation for a

redistributionist effort to achieve social justice, there is

also nothing to suggest the reductionist reliance on free

markets that characterizes modern conservatism. Tocqueville

recognizes the wage power that owners have over labor, and

suggests that “this state of dependence and misery…

deserves… to attract the particular attention of the

legislator” lest “wages fall in a permanent manner”70

causing gross social inequalities. The clear implication is

that, without government intervention and regulation in an

industrialized economy, the equality of conditions and

economic opportunities that sustain democracy would be

undermined. Tocqueville insists that the stability of

democracy (and politics in general) depends on assuring that

“each has something to keep and little to take” and that

democracy requires “an innumerable multitude of almost

70 Ibid., 557.

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similar men who… possess enough goods to desire order and

not enough of them to excite envy.”71 As such, the left

could argue, as Robert Dahl has in direct confrontation with

Hayek and Friedman, that Tocqueville, by grounding

democratic self-government and political freedoms in an

equality of conditions, suggests that the potential conflict

is not so much between equality and political freedom as it

is between political and economic freedom. In other words,

economic freedom, by threatening to undermine the equality

of conditions that sustains democracy, potentially clashes

with and erodes democracy’s political freedoms as well.72

Given the supreme value that Tocqueville places on political

freedom, it would follow that he would be sympathetic to

restraints on economic freedom to assure social equality.

While admittedly the foregoing is merely a subtle

appetizer for the left compared to the rich banquet of

Madisonian liberalism and Burkean traditionalism served up

to the right, I would argue that important elements of

Tocqueville’s analysis are not incompatible with a leftist

71 Ibid., 607.72 Dahl, op. cit., p. 161.

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political and social critique, and that Tocqueville may well

have been impressed by such a critique. I would argue that

Tocqueville provides a foundation that could serve as a

profound platform for criticizing post-modern American

democracy. From the vantage point of a largely agrarian,

pre-industrial society, Tocqueville could not have

considered that the two endpoints of decline that he foresaw

for democracy—industrial aristocracy or democratic despotism

—are not mutually exclusive, that both fears could come to

fruition and be mutually reinforcing as they mutate into

another condition entirely. With American politics and mass

culture shaped and driven by multinational corporations,

that is arguably exactly what is happening.

Consider a scenario in which an industrial aristocracy,

with an unprecedented concentration of wealth and global

power, could come to dominate American politics by

simultaneously erecting expensive media gateways to popular

recognition, and then contributing exclusively to favored

candidates who can be relied upon to protect corporate

power. In order to build majority support for its policies,

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the resulting government, with allies in corporate-sponsored

foundations and news outlets, would present itself as the

sole protector of democratic values, and would attempt to

sustain its majority by intimidating opponents with

assertions that they are unpatriotic and even treasonous. A

major goal of this political alliance would be the abolition

of taxes on estates and investment returns, thus creating

the potential for family dynasties whose assets and income

are insulated from public use in perpetuity. The

government’s relentless support of corporate demands for

open borders, both for free trade and immigration, would

globalize labor markets, raising the prospect that equality

of conditions might come to describe the connection of

America’s working class with that of less developed

countries, while inequalities deepened within the United

States itself. With its standard of living under threat, and

feeling impotent against the open cash-based manipulation of

its elected representatives, a third of all citizens would

routinely abandon their right to vote, the most fundamental

form of political participation. By controlling the nation’s

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media outlets, the industrial aristocracy could dominate and

manipulate popular culture by relentlessly promoting

consumerism, and marketing mindless entertainments for a

celebrity-obsessed populace, thereby assuring that “they

think only of enjoying themselves,” and are distracted from

the political, economic and environmental crises that

envelop them. The techniques of mass marketing would be

adopted by religious leaders, turning religious services

into a form of entertainment and narcissistic self-

improvement, as well as reducing the gospel to a weapon

against the political opponents of the government and its

allies. Finally, the United States would have a President

who, confronting a moment of national crisis which had

precipitated the highest civic awareness and patriotic

yearning for involvement in over 50 years, would dissipate

the opportunity for service and participation with the

advice to hug children and to go to the mall and shop. One

can only wonder how Tocqueville would have responded to

that.

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