Modernity and Its Discontents by Steven B. Smith

Author:Steven B. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016-09-04T16:00:00+00:00

THE DANGERS OF CENTRALIZATION

The difference between the accounts of tyranny in Democracy I and Democracy II could not be more striking. “Fear of despotism was Tocqueville’s own earliest and most powerful political passion,” Jean-Claude Lamberti has written, but the locus of despotic power changed dramatically in the five years separating the publication of the two Democracies.13

Tocqueville’s 1835 account of the tyranny of the majority remained tied to a fear of mobocracy, or mob rule. The danger of the “mobocratic spirit,” as Abraham Lincoln called it, was certainly a theme of the Federalist’s legacy, with its fear of the direct participation of the people in legislation. The dangers of mob psychology were never far from the Federalist’s mind. “Had every Athenian been a Socrates,” James Madison warned, “every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”14 More to the point, the fear of tyranny was a consequence of the memory of the National Convention during the French Revolution. Revolution and tyranny were virtually synonymous with each other for the first generation of postrevolutionary writers like Constant, François Guizot, and Pierre Paul Royer-Collard.15 But by the time Tocqueville wrote his 1840 account of tyranny, either the memory or the fear of revolution (or both) had begun to wane. An important chapter from Democracy II was called “Why Great Revolutions Will Become Rare” (II.iii.21 [606–17]). It is doubtful that Tocqueville would have written that five years earlier.

What accounts for Tocqueville’s change of mind? As the dangers of revolutionary violence and mob rule began to wane in Tocqueville’s mind, a new threat gradually arose to take its place. This was the danger of the centralization of power. Tocqueville is often read as a critic of centralization and a defender of local self-government. To be sure, this is not incorrect, although it grasps only a part of the picture. Tocqueville did not, as did Montesquieu, eulogize the place of the provincial parlements and other intermediary institutions as the basis of political liberty. He was deeply aware of the injustice of this system and saw many benefits in having a unified center of law. It is not the growth of state power per se that bothers Tocqueville but the rise of bureaucracy and with it the growth of the centralizing spirit. Exactly what Hegel, almost twenty years before, had seen as a professional class educated to take over the care and administration of the state, Tocqueville came to regard as the most serious threat to political liberty.

The theme of centralization is a constant in Tocqueville’s thought, not only linking the two volumes of the Democracy but also providing the connection between the Democracy and his other great work, The Old Regime and the Revolution. The issue of centralization emerges early in Democracy I with Tocqueville’s distinction between political centralization and administrative centralization (I.i.5 [82–93]). Tocqueville regarded political or governmental centralization as a good thing. The idea of a uniform center of legislation was greatly to be preferred to any system of competing or overlapping sovereignties. Governmental

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