Civil Associations Are The Dukes and Barons of Modern Democracy

Lessons from Tocqueville's Democracy in America

One of the pre-eminent theorists of civil society and civil associations, Alexis de Tocqueville, had keen observational skills and an uncanny knack for capturing the spirit of democratic societies with sweeping and vivid descriptions. The rich associational life of the young United States provided Tocqueville with an invaluable real-world laboratory to understand how associations can work in a democratic, post-aristocratic era in which social conditions were increasingly equalised across different groups (compared with more aristocratic societies).

The Ambivalent Liberating Power of Freedom of Association

For Tocqueville, the relation between democracy and freedom of association is ambivalent. On the one hand, the equal social conditions favoured by democratic culture and institutions frees citizens from the bonds of rigid social hierarchies and age-old institutions, leaving them at liberty to form associations of their choice with their equals. On the other hand, the dismantlement of the privileges of ancient institutions like churches, family dynasties, and universities removed vital counterweights to the power and prestige of the State, clearing the way for tyranny of the majority and the “soft” administrative despotism of a paternalistic State that pretended to regulate the minutiae of everyone’s life in the name of the “will of the people.”

Though Tocqueville in no way seeks to idyllicise feudal and aristocratic societies, he recognises that insofar as they entailed a dispersal of power and authority across many different actors and groups, they often made it more difficult for one central actor to dominate a society from the top down. With the destruction of feudalism and aristocracy, citizens began to see themselves as free-standing individuals, and the State acquired disproportionate prestige and power in the absence of serious competitors such as powerful bishops, barons, and lords. The disintegration of robust corporate actors that could effectively compete with the central state for citizens’ allegiances prepared the way for what Tocqueville calls “democratic despotism.”