Is Civil Society Strong Enough to Withstand the Menace of Democratic Despotism? - Part 1
In this special blog series, I will explore the problem of democratic despotism - that is, the tyranny exercised over citizens “in the name of the people” - using the ideas of 19th century French democratic theorist Alexis de Tocqueville to inspire my analysis.
The great theorist of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), famously argued that one of the pillars of a free society is the art of association. Free associations of citizens, whether in the civil or political sphere, provided citizens with a social context and a set of incentives to cooperate with their peers in shared projects, helping them to come out of themselves and care about something bigger than their own immediate concerns. Associational life also provided citizens with a sense of identity, belonging, and support that weakened the capacity of the modern state to place itself at the centre of their lives and regulate their most minute activities.
The relation between democracy and free associations (whether political associations such as municipalities or civil associations such as churches and schools) is ambivalent from Tocqueville’s perspective. On the one hand, the equal social conditions favoured by democratic culture and institutions frees citizens from the bonds of rigid social hierarchies and inherited social roles, leaving them at liberty to form new associations with their equals. The act of associating in a democratic age was no longer simply a given, as it was in feudal societies in which many associations were more or less imposed by circumstances and tradition; it required intelligence, creativity, and intentionality.
Fortunately, these appeared to exist in abundance in the America of the 1830s that Tocqueville visited, in which voluntary associations of all sorts appeared to proliferate. The America that Alexis de Tocqueville knew was living proof that a democratic culture could exist alongside flourishing associations of free citizens, devoted to a vast number of commercial and civil enterprises.
On the other hand, Tocqueville perceived serious dangers lurking within democratic culture and institutions for the future of free associations. Democracy provides three conditions that together favour the regulation and control by a centralised administrative State of the most minute details of associational life, even to the point of destroying the independence and reasonable prerogatives of non-State associations:
First, a hankering by citizens after equal and uniform conditions for all, making them impatient with the granting of robust autonomy, privileges or prerogatives to associations
Second, a compelling narrative of popular sovereignty that resonated with the democratic spirit of the age, elevating the prerogatives of the sovereign above those of rival associations;
Third, a suite of powerful fiscal and regulatory tools concentrated in the hands of a centralised administrative state. Once the strong prerogatives of princes, priests, and nobles were set aside, the democratic State could freely assert its democratic mandates over society and meet with limited resistance.
Indeed, the State could become a sort of “soft despot” or gentle Master who looked out for citizens’ most minute interests, removing from them either the need or the incentive to associate to satisfy their everyday needs. This “immense and tutelary power” “willingly works for (citizens’) happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?”1
The principal instrument of paternalism, in Tocquevilles’ view, was the administrative, regulatory State, which could extend its regulatory tentacles into every aspect of social life, placing exhausting regulatory obstacles in the path of human intelligence and initiative: “Subjection in small affairs,” he remarks, “little by little…extinguishes (citizens’) spirits and enervates their souls.”2
All of these dangers can be summed up by the tendency of the democratic spirit to elevate the will, interests, and prerogatives of the demos and its trustees above those of rival actors, whether individual or corporate. The social and moral psychology of democratic nations is predisposed to invest authority uncritically in the mythical construct of “the people,” and by extension, any person or corporate actor that can make a credible claim to act in the people’s name.
Citizens of democratic societies, according to Tocqueville, “willingly enough grant that the power representing society possesses much more enlightenment and wisdom than any of the men who compose it, and that its duty as well as its right is to take each citizen by the hand and lead him.”3 Tocqueville’s contemporaries “dispute constantly to know into whose hands sovereignty will be delivered, but…easily agree on the duties and rights of sovereignty (as) a lone, simple, providential, and creative power.” Slavish subjection to the State can be reconciled in people’s minds with their own freedom, because each individual “sees that it is not a man or a class but the people themselves that hold the end of the chain.”4
If this is how people view democratic governments, it follows that those who cannot credibly claim to speak in the name of “the people” at large, such as the members of free associations and their representatives, would tend to be viewed in a democratic society as subordinate or inferior to representatives of “the people” such as legislators and government ministers.
This state of affairs puts free associations in a rather precarious position, because the authority of “the people,” or a majority thereof, or the authority of anyone who can make a credible claim to speak on behalf of “the people,” can easily exert itself over the social fabric, even to the point of destroying the vibrancy and independence of free associations, or subsuming their privileges and prerogatives within the bosom of its own constitution, to be accepted or rejected at its own good pleasure.
In the next instalment of this essay, I discuss some ways the dangers of democratic despotism pointed out by Tocqueville may be resisted.
Democracy in America, Vol. 2, part 4, chap. 6
Democracy in America, Vol. 2, part 4, chap. 6.
Vol. 2, part 4, chap. 2.
Vol. 2, part 4, chap. 6