Tocqueville on the Welfare State
It was published in the second issue of a new publication, New Individualist Review. This was a student publication: a quarterly small magazine. It was the best student publication I had ever seen. I still think so. I was a subscriber from the beginning. It was published for seven years.
The Foundation for Economic Education has reprinted the essay here. I offer extracts.
[The power of government] covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power… does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, until each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and hard-working animals, of which the government is the shepherd.’ – Alexis De Tocqueville
Alexis De Tocqueville was an aristocrat who was at the same time the most perceptive critic and the truest friend that democracy ever had; he loved liberty, as he himself said, with "a holy passion," and his greatest fear was that in the new Age of the Common Man the ideal of equality would become the means by which freedom would be extinguished.
His two books, Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the French Revolution, earned for Tocqueville a lasting reputation primarily because he did not think that the historian’s role should be confined to relating facts or that the sociologist should be merely a statistician; he was interested in something more than in what the "scientific" historians called wie es gewesen (what actually happened). What he wanted to do was to understand why institutions grew up and why events came about. Describing America he regarded as much less important than the task of analyzing democracy. . . .
He has been called "the prophet of the mass age," because he foresaw, in 1835, what were to become the two great movements of our time: the increasing centralization of government power and the irreversible trend toward equality. The first movement he condemned without any hesitation; the second, he welcomed, with reservations. He knew that democracy, while inevitable, could come to any country in either one of two forms: a free variety or an unfree. By a free democracy, Tocqueville meant what we now call nineteenth-century liberalism: a democratically elected government in which the rights of the individual are supreme and are safeguarded by a constitution putting definite limits on the power of the state. Unfree democracy, according to Tocqueville, can again be divided into two types. The first of these is the totalitarian state which is based on the belief that one man (Fuehrer-prinzip) or group of men (dictatorship of the vanguard of the proletariat) effectively represents the will of the people and is mandated by them to eliminate all opposition. The second type is usually spoken of today as the Welfare State; it is what I have called in the title of this essay "the Bland Leviathan," a despotism different from the first in that it is gentle and benevolent. This does not mean, however, that the second form of despotism is any more to be desired than the first; as Justice Brandeis has remarked, "Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent."
Tocqueville saw that the real threat to a democratic society in our age would not be what the Tories dreaded, anarchy, nor would it be the absolute dictatorship feared by the Old Liberals; rather, it would be the mild tyranny of mediocrity, a standardization of mind and spirit, a gray uniformity enforced by a central government in the name of "humanity" and "social justice." . . .
Three decades before the Wohlfahrstaat of Bismarck and a full century before the Second New Deal, Tocqueville correctly perceived what many men of good minds and liberal education have difficulty in seeing even today. He understood that the time would come when a "new thing" which he could not name would have a power that is "absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild." Its authority would be like that of a parent, he wrote, except that a parent prepares his children for adulthood, while this power seeks, on the contrary, to keep its charges in perpetual childhood. This government willingly labors for the happiness of its subjects, "but it chooses to be the sole agent and only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?"
This then, as Tocqueville foresaw it, is the approximate condition of society in the United States today. We live in the shadow of a "Bland Leviathan," an overpowering influence predicated on the root assumption that the needs of society, as determined by the planners, should take precedence over the liberties of individuals. He saw that this leviathan was implacably opposed to individuality and free growth, to all the great moments of Western civilization, and, indeed, to human nature itself. The three necessities of a higher civilization—progress, excellence, and freedom—have always been its natural enemies. Because it is bland and because it lacks a definite purpose, it does not attempt to kill these enemies outright; instead, it imprisons, cripples, or slowly suffocates them.
Any limitation on freedom, Tocqueville realized, must inevitably restrict progress. He feared, in fact, that the equalitarian oppression which was aimed at society’s most independent thinkers would result in a general deadening of civilization. "Man will waste his strength in bootless and solitary trifling," he wrote, "and swing backwards and forwards forever without getting fresh ideas."
Ironically, it is many of our best and most creative minds that are bringing us to a point where our medical profession, most of our educational system, and the greater part of our scientists will be slowly absorbed under the all-protecting power of the federal government. Beguiled as they are by the humanitarian visions of the Welfare State, these men have forgotten what, upon reflection, they must admit: that no man or group of men can hope to direct the creative energies of a nation without those energies being diverted into the safe and traditional patterns so congenial to administrators.
Progress has been defined as that which the rules and regulations do not foresee. Admiral Hyman Rickover, among many others, has recently borne witness to the difficulties in any system where professional administrators are assigned to supervise intellectuals.¹° The instincts of the two groups are almost completely opposed. The creative man wants plenty of room and time to follow his own hunches; he often harbors a disinterest in, or even a contempt for, the other "members of the team." The bureaucrat is trained to shun innovations; he is suspicious of reform; his life is dedicated to following precedents; in his world there is no place for initiative.
Just as no society based on the principles of the Welfare State can encourage progress, neither can it long endure the existence of excellence—except as a strictly private possession to be nurtured after hours or in retirement. It is becoming increasingly clear that in all but a few parts of the "public sector" and in large areas of the private, all talent above the average is being quietly smothered in the name of "equality" and "democracy." Since above-average ability in the right places is, of course, a necessity for progress and productivity, it is not difficult to see where the road we are on will end.
Next to freedom itself, the ruling passion of Tocqueville’s life was a hostility to mediocrity in all its forms. He was certain that when the average, the norm, are consistently held up as standards to be identified with, individuality and with it a free society—must soon perish.
After progress and excellence have been relegated to the dustbin of history, freedom will be the last victim of the Welfare State as it makes the transition to a totalitarian regime. As government gets bigger and bigger, there is an increasing tendency for the democratically elected legislature to delegate wider and wider powers to administrative agencies. These agencies are always supervised by nonelected officials who are practically independent of the President, the Congress, or the courts." Lord Ewart, in his important book, The New Despotism, cites as one example of this trend the Rating and Valuation Act of 1925 in which it is provided that… "[the Minister] may modify the provisions of this Act so far as may appear to the Minister necessary or expedient for carrying [his orders] into effect." The planners, it has been said, start by wanting to control things, but they end by controlling people.
Evidence such as this, which points to the inherent dangers in an expanding government, has, by 1961, become overwhelming. Despite all these examples, however, we are still being solemnly assured by people who will insist that they are democrats, that we should not be afraid of state power. After all, they will say, we ourselves are the government. Except for a few minor cases, this platitude was never true, and in this century, there is far less basis for the idea than there ever was.
The proper solution to the problems posed by democracy, according to Tocqueville, was not a reversion to aristocracy, but rather a renewed determination to harness the many virtues of the democratic process in order to insure that the rights of individuals would not be sacrificed to the demands of the state. He believed that free institutions could not be preserved except on a basis of equality. "Far from finding fault with equality because it inspires a spirit of independence," he wrote, "I praise it primarily for that very reason." By making all men conscious of their rights, he thought, "equality would prepare the remedy for the ills which it engenders."
Tocqueville clearly showed the way in which modern society could, if it chooses, escape from "the new despotism." A proper concept of equality is the first necessity; everywhere we must strengthen the position of private individuals—at all levels of society—in their own rights and property. Almost as important, we must strengthen those intermediate powers which stand between the government and ourselves, that is, our churches, labor unions, newspapers, political parties, business organizations, fraternal orders, and so on. It is difficult, in a mass society, for one person to make himself heard, but it can be done if he uses the amplifier provided by his like-minded associates. Following the same principle, we must maintain all the peculiar rights and duties of each of our independent governing bodies: the courts, Congress, the Presidency, the states, and the local administrations. At the same time we must be alert to promptly limit any or all of these bodies when they exceed their authorized powers.
We must also beware of slogans such as "national interest" or "national purpose." The words "national interest," especially in a time of war or emergency, often do mean something, but just as often they serve merely as a convenient device for justifying authoritarianism. The notion behind the idea of a national purpose, of course, is a dangerous one. It is based on the assumption that there is a collective interest which is separate and different from the interests of all the people who compose the society. In this country, until recently, we have always had individual hopes, ambitions, purposes; we have left the "national purposes" to the totalitarian states with their stadiums full of troops and flags.
As we have seen, no man better understood this conflict between the individual and the collective than did Tocqueville. On this problem, as on many others, he expressed what needed to be said when he wrote:
It would seem as if the rulers of our time sought only to use men to make things great; I wish that they would try a little more to make great men; that they would set less value on the work and more on the workman; that they would never forget that a nation cannot long remain strong when every man belonging to it is individually weak; and that no form or combination of social policy has yet been devised to make an energetic people out of a community of pusillanimous and enfeebled citizens.
This is not an ideal to appeal to many politicians—who love power—but it should appeal to all those who love the ideas that Tocqueville worked so hard to preserve: progress, excellence, and freedom.