Temas de relações internacionais, de política externa e de diplomacia brasileira, com ênfase em políticas econômicas, viagens, livros e cultura em geral. Um quilombo de resistência intelectual em defesa da racionalidade, da inteligência e das liberdades democráticas. Ver também minha página: www.pralmeida.net (em construção).
Gertrude Himmelfarb, our foremost historian of ideas and one of the nation’s greatest historians of any stamp, died Monday at 97. Though a Washingtonian for the last decades of her long and productive life, the Brooklyn-born Himmelfarb was among the last of a storied band of New York Jewish intellectuals—the “Family,” they called themselves—who joined scholarly erudition to wide-ranging social, political, cultural, and ethical concerns far transcending the merely academic. They wrote for an educated general audience eager for the acuity with which they brought the wisdom and experience of the past to bear on the problems of present-day life. Through much reflection and debate, they’d mostly thought their way through the Trotskyist political correctness that prevailed in their student days to arrive at a liberal Americanism that, in time, metamorphosed into their own brand of conservativism. Now, with wonks and pundits, pedants and ideologues, taking their places, and with the “educated general reader” going extinct, today’s intellectuals seem shallow and dull by contrast.
Acerbic in her impatience with foolishness, Himmelfarb particularly scorned the Marxoid view that people’s beliefs and ideals have no independent reality but are just reflections of the material conditions around them. She rejected social-policy theories that give short shrift to cultural life, ignoring what goes on in people’s minds and hearts as a mere reflection of the real reality—the economic reality that should be the focus of our attention. According to this viewpoint, what people think can’t possibly alter the large forces that shape their lives. What determines individual behavior is the environment, not the content of the mind and spirit of the individual—as in, for example, the belief that crime springs from a lack of opportunity. She wasn’t much more sympathetic to social-policy thinkers who consider individuals the authors of their own actions and fates only to the extent that they choose rationally among various economic incentives—a welfare check versus a minimum-wage job, say. To her, this was just another way of saying that individuals merely respond mechanically to the environment: they don’t shape it.
As she saw it, beliefs shape behavior and transform the environment, rather than only vice-versa. The ideals that a culture transmits to its citizens affect whether they will be victims or masters of circumstance. In the introduction to her 1986 book, Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians, she remarked that the essays in that volume had what she called an almost obsessively unifying theme—the theme of the moral imagination, in the phrase of Lionel Trilling and, before him, Edmund Burke—a phrase that she also used as the title of a 2006 collection of essays. This theme unifies all her extraordinary works, beginning with her first book, on Lord Acton, subtitled “A Study in Conscience and Politics,” and including her magisterial Poverty and Compassion, subtitled “The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians.” Far larger than everyday propriety, the moral imagination refers, as Himmelfarb puts it, to “the morality that dignifies and civilizes human beings, removing us from our natural brutish state.” It is the specifically human faculty that converts a mere featherless biped, as the Victorian sage Thomas Carlyle liked to say, into a creature of intelligence and a man.
Central to Himmelfarb’s thought was the relation between the moral imagination and poverty—the moral imagination of the larger society and of the poor themselves. Nowhere does she explicate this theme more profoundly than in The De-moralization of Society, published in 1995. How was it, she asks, that over the course of the nineteenth century, all of Britain’s key indicators of social pathology markedly improved? The illegitimacy rate, 7 percent in 1845, plunged below 4 percent by century’s end. Between 1857 and 1901, the crime rate fell by half, so that even while the population soared from 19 million to 33 million, the absolute number of serious crimes decreased. The prostitutes and drunks common at midcentury had become so scarce by 1900 that they no longer seemed a pressing social ill.
All this happened amid urbanization and industrialization that some theorists held should have produced social disintegration, not social improvement. But a much stronger force swept all before it: Victorian culture in general, and Victorian morality in particular, with its emphasis on virtue, respectability, work, self-help, sobriety, cleanliness, and family. The great Victorian achievement, as Himmelfarb saw it, was a “moral reformation” that allowed Britain “to attain a degree of civility and humaneness that was the envy of the rest of the world.”
It was a deeply self-conscious reformation, sparked by such value-laden institutions as Sunday schools and the temperance movement, by the “cult of respectability” and allegiance to duty even when belief in God and immortality began to falter, by the factory acts and great sanitation projects by which the propertied classes set out to improve the lives of the poor. It was a profoundly democratic reformation, too, Himmelfarb explains. “In attributing to everyone the same virtues—potentially at least, if not in actuality—[the Victorians] assumed a common human nature and thus a moral (although not a political or an economic) equality.” Just look at how the idea of a gentleman changed over the nineteenth century from a class term to a mainly moral term, so that such virtues as “integrity, honesty, generosity, courage, graciousness, politeness, [or] consideration for others” could distinguish a middle-class Victorian—even sometimes a laborer—as a gentleman.
Key to the reformation was the family. To the Victorians, the family home was “a sacred place”; family and home together, says Himmelfarb, “constituted something like a civic religion.” The foundation of the social order, families were universally recognized as the great schools of citizenship and civilization. If Victorian families didn’t grant women the freedom we moderns demand, married women’s lives were much more fulfilled than jeering critics, from Lytton Strachey onward, have contended. Even as Victorian family values embodied the comfortable middle-class ethic, they were democratized to include working-class families as well: far from feeling victims of class and patriarchal oppression, working-class wives overwhelmingly reported themselves satisfied and fulfilled by their lot.
The reformation succeeded so well also because it extended below the working class, to the poorest of the poor. Victorian welfare policy, embodied in the 1834 Poor Law, rested on a single moral proposition: that the conditions of life on relief for the able-bodied poor should be “less eligible”—less attractive—than those of the meanest wage earner’s life The goal: to make welfare less appealing than work and to honor effort by making sure that its rewards always surpassed the wages of idleness.
The result was the system of workhouses Dickens excoriated in Oliver Twist: welfare came at the cost of giving up your liberty and bearing a stigma. However harsh, the system worked: welfare expenditure, £8 million in 1817, remained at that figure in 1871—though the population had doubled. As Himmelfarb judges: “[S]tigmas are the corollaries of values. If work, independence, responsibility, respectability are valued, then their converse must be devalued, seen as disreputable.“ Accordingly, hand-in-hand with harshness toward the “undeserving” poor went benevolent philanthropy toward the “deserving” poor, ranging from organized efforts to educate them and improve their working and living conditions to individual acts of charity to help them through hard times.
To Himmelfarb, poverty is as much a matter of the mind and spirit as of the pocket. Perhaps today’s prevalence of illegitimacy, welfare dependency, crime, school failure, drug use, and the like among the intergenerational poor has much to do with our culture’s push to remove the stigma from these things at the same time that it has devalued middle-class—Victorian—virtues and traditional family life, not just for the poor but for us all. To cure it, social policymakers will need to take a larger view of human freedom than the shrunken one that has left society so demoralized, in both senses of the word.
Himmelfarb and her husband, Irving Kristol—she was Bea Kristol in private life—were beloved friends and precious mentors to me. When they still lived in New York, one of the great treats of my wife’s and my life was their periodic invitation to Sunday lunch, where we might meet a congressman or an ambassador (Bibi Netanyahu, as it happened), and where Bea taught me how to make horseradish sauce. Even before I met her, an essay of Bea’s on Burke in her 1968 Victorian Minds had helped nudge me down the road to conservatism. As for the civic religion of family, nothing demonstrated to me the truth of our mutual friend Daniel Bell’s judgment that the Kristols’ marriage was the happiest of their generation as much as a disagreement they once had at our dinner table—a long and intense dispute about whether President Ronald Reagan should visit a military cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe and to show that our former enemies were now our ever-closer friends and allies in the Cold War. Trouble was, as the White House learned after accepting the invitation, Waffen–SS officers were buried in that graveyard, so the president’s wreath would appear to honor among the very worst of Nazi murderers.
Irving, who had advised Reagan to go, contended that the visit was pure realpolitik, and that canceling the ceremony now, instead of demonstrating that bygones were bygones, would inflame mutual hostility. Bea maintained that morality was morality: that the Holocaust was pure evil and could not in any way be papered over, much less honored. The two went at this for half an hour, my wife and I egging Bea on. Our other guests uttered scarcely a word, one couple out of fascination, the other out of fear of saying the wrong thing. But it wasfascinating, because, in all this time, Irving, though clearly getting the worst of the discussion, never lost his characteristic unruffled, benevolent sweetness, and Bea—with her delicate bones, sharp features, energetic animation, and keen, all-observant eye, resembling some rare, small, royal falcon—never argued but only debated, though with every so often a characteristic, “Oh, Irving!” A model and an inspiration.
I remember Irving speaking at his 60th birthday party of his thankfulness for all that America had bestowed on him. “I never imagined I’d have a color TV set,” he said, “or a washing machine.”
“Oh, Irving!” said Bea. “We don’t have a washing machine. It’s a dishwasher.”
They were both truly thankful for all that America had given them. When they resided in New York, Bea’s mother lived with them for a time. She would stand for hours at their big window looking north over Central Park, puzzling out what to make of all the joggers. Perhaps with memories of the Russian pogroms her family had fled in her childhood, she would say to herself: “I don’t understand. What are they running from?” That was the beauty of America, Bea and Irving knew. They didn’t have to run away from anything.
Alexis de Tocqueville was a more prophetic
observer of American democracy than even his most ardent admirers
appreciate. True, readers have seen clearly what makes his account of
American exceptionalism so luminously accurate, and they have grasped
the profundity of his critique of American democracy’s shortcomings.
What they have missed is his startling clairvoyance about how democracy
in America could evolve into what he called “democratic despotism.” That
transformation has been in process for decades now, and reversing it is
the principal political challenge of our own moment in history. It is
implicitly, and should be explicitly, at the center of our upcoming
presidential election.
Readers don’t fully credit Tocqueville with being the seer he was for the same reason that, though volume 1 of Democracy in America
set cash registers jingling as merrily as Santa’s sleigh bells at its
1835 publication, volume 2, five years later, met a much cooler
reception. The falloff, I think, stems from the author’s failure to make
plain a key step in his argument between the two tomes—an omission he
righted two decades later with the publication of The Old Regime and the French Revolution
in 1856. Reading the two books together makes Tocqueville’s
argument—and its urgent timeliness—snap into focus with the clarity of
revelation. Alexis de Tocqueville in 1850 (RMN-GRAND PALAIS/ART RESOURCE, NY)
What’s missing in volume 2 of Democracy is concrete,
illustrative detail. Volume 1 mines nine months of indefatigable travel
that began in May 1831 in Newport, Rhode Island—“an array of houses no
bigger than chicken coops”—when the aristocratic French lawyer was still
two months shy of his 26th birthday. Tocqueville’s epic journey
extended from New York City through the virgin forests of Michigan to
Lake Superior, from Montreal through New England, Pennsylvania, Ohio,
Kentucky, and Tennessee by coach, steamboat, and even on foot through
snow-choked woods, until he and his traveling companion, Gustave de
Beaumont, boarded a steamer for New Orleans. From there, they crossed
the Carolinas into Virginia, visited Washington, and returned to New
York to embark for home with a trunkful of notes and American histories.
Tocqueville had watched both houses of Congress in action and
interviewed 200-odd people, ranging from President Andrew Jackson,
ex-president John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State Edward Livingston,
Senator Daniel Webster, Supreme Court Justice John McLean, and future
chief justice Salmon Chase to Sam Houston, a band of Choctaw Indians,
and “the last of the Iroquois: they begged for alms.”
Only by the time The Old Regime came out, though, three years
before Tocqueville’s untimely death from tuberculosis at 53 in 1859, had
he amassed the wealth of practical political experience needed to flesh
out the argument of Democracy in America’s second volume. After
three terms in the Chamber of Deputies during Louis Philippe’s bourgeois
monarchy, he had served in the Constituent Assembly following the 1848
revolution, helping to write the Second Republic’s constitution and
serving as foreign minister, until president Louis Napoleon made himself
emperor. He had researched The Old Regime by reading mountains
of official reports and correspondence from the 1750s onward in the
archives, chiefly of Tours and Paris. All this allowed him to document
what had been inspired but mostly theoretical speculation in volume 2 of
Democracy in America.
Tocqueville didn’t go to America out of blind democratic enthusiasm.
“It is very difficult to decide whether democracy governs better, or
aristocracy,” he mused: but the question is merely academic, because
anyone who pays attention to swiftly shifting French affairs—from the
Revolution, the Directory, and Napoleon to the Restoration and the
constitutional monarchy of 1830—can’t deny that “sooner or later we will
come, as the Americans have come, to an almost complete equality of
conditions.” In that case, “[w]ould it not then become necessary to
consider the gradual development of democratic institutions and mores
not as the best way to be free but as the only way left to us?”
So he went to America in search of “lessons from which we might
profit”—negative lessons as well as positive ones. And just after the
publication of volume 1 of Democracy in America, he cast his own
lot with democracy, marrying, to his family’s horror, a beautiful
middle-class English Protestant, Mary Mottley, whom he considered “the
only person in the world who knows the bottom of my soul”—but who never
shed her middle-class outrage at “the least deviation on my part,” he
complained. After all, who can stop his “blood boiling at the sight of a
woman”? (And, already at 17, he had fathered a child, whose fate is
unknown, with a servant girl.) Still, he at least remained faithful to
democracy: when he inherited the title Comte de Tocqueville in 1836, he
never used it. In America, he believed, he’d find democracy
in its purest form—morally pure but also unmixed with any vestiges of a
hierarchical regime from which it had had to revolt, unlike any other
modern democracy. The earliest Anglo-American settlers had crossed the
sea to begin the political world afresh. This band of equals had “braved
the inevitable miseries of exile because they wished to ensure the
victory of an idea,” he wrote—the Puritan idea that “was not just
a religious doctrine” but that “coincided with the most absolute
democratic and republican theories,” inseparably intertwining “the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty.”
For the Pilgrims, Tocqueville explained, “Religion looks upon civil
liberty as a noble exercise of man’s faculties, and on the world of
politics as a realm intended by the Creator for the application of man’s
intelligence. . . . Liberty looks upon religion as its comrade in
battle and victory, as the cradle of its infancy and divine source of
its rights.” As the settlers believed, “religion subjects the truths of
the other world to individual reason, just as politics leaves the
interest of this world to the good sense of all, and it allows each man
free choice of the path that is to lead him to heaven, just as the law
grants each citizen the right to choose his government.”
Nongovernmental associations spring up for furthering ‘public security, commerce and industry, morality and religion.’
So Puritanism was the wellspring of American mores—a key term for
Tocqueville that refers not just to “what one might call habits of the
heart, but also to the various notions that men possess, to the diverse
opinions that are current among them, and to the whole range of ideas
that shape habits of mind.” In French, the word is moeurs, meaning manners, morals, core beliefs, and customs—what we would call culture.
There are “three major factors that have governed and shaped American
democracy,” Tocqueville argued, “but if I were asked to rank them, I
would say that physical causes matter less than laws and laws less than
mores.”
From the seventeenth-century Puritan acorn grew American culture’s
fundamentally libertarian creed. Universal reason (which reveals
Jefferson’s self-evident truths, for example) is the source of moral
authority, “just as the source of political power lies in the
universality of citizens.” Most Americans believe that “consensus is the
only guide to what is permitted or prohibited, true or false,” and that
“the man who properly understands his own self-interest has all the
guidance he needs to act justly and honestly. They believe that every
person is born with the faculty to govern himself and that no one has
the right to force happiness on his fellow man.” And they believe in
human perfectibility, the usefulness of the spread of enlightenment, and
the certainty of progress, so that what seems good today will give way
tomorrow to something better but as yet unimagined.
Why are your ships not built to last? Tocqueville once asked an
American sailor. Naval architecture improves so quickly, the sailor
replied, that the finest ship would be obsolete before it wore out. A
Silicon Valley engineer would sound the same today. Not surprisingly, a culture that leaves men
free to judge for themselves in religion and politics nurtures
independent self-reliance from childhood on. Even in the schoolyard,
American children make up their own rules and punish infractions
themselves. As adults, they never think of waiting for government to
solve everyday problems. If a road gets blocked, they organize
themselves to fix it. If they want to celebrate something, they
spontaneously join together to make the festivities as fun and grand as
possible. Spontaneous nongovernmental associations spring up for
furthering “public security, commerce and industry, morality and
religion,” Tocqueville marvels, pointing to the temperance movement and
the founding of seminaries and hospitals as just a few examples. “There
is nothing the human will despairs of achieving through the free action
of the collective power of individuals.” Free and collaborative: that’s
the mainspring of American mores.
With such an emphasis on self-reliance, it’s also no surprise to see
American trade and industry booming. The typical American is “ardent in
his desires, enterprising, adventurous, and above all innovative,”
Tocqueville writes. Focused on material gratifications, and seeing
idleness as shameful, Americans “think only of ways to change or improve
their fortunes,” so that “any new method that shortens the road to
wealth, any machine that saves labor, any instrument that reduces the
cost of production, any discovery that facilitates or increases pleasure
seems the most magnificent achievement of the human mind.” If one
scheme fails, an American doesn’t quit: “picking himself up again, often
disappointed, never discouraged, he marches indefatigably on toward the
immense grandeur that he can but dimly make out at the end of the long
road that mankind has yet to travel.” No wonder Tocqueville judges (as
Arthur Goldhammer deftly translates him for the Library of America) that
“there is something heroic about the way Americans do business.” These
traits will soon enough make Americans “one of the greatest peoples of
the world. Their offspring will blanket all of North America. . . .
Wealth, power, and glory will inevitably be theirs some day, yet they
hasten after this immense fortune as though they had but a moment left
to lay hold of it.”
And note, Tocqueville emphasizes, that all this is the product of
culture and institutions. With the same natural advantages, but
different mores, the Spaniards of South America have created some of the
most “miserable” nations on earth. Similarly, with a vast wilderness
stretching from their doorstep, French settlers in Canada have chosen to
“squeeze themselves into a space too small to hold them.” Tocqueville’s
friend Gustave de Beaumont made this sketch of Frenchman Island in New
York State’s Lake Oneida when the two travelers (doubtless depicted in
the lower left corner) explored it in July 1831. (YALE TOCQUEVILLE
MANUSCRIPTS. GENERAL COLLECTION, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT
LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY)America’s unique history also powerfully
shaped its political culture. The Mother Country was only too pleased to
see its turbulent Puritans slip over the horizon, and it ignored them
for well over a century. So America developed from the village up,
rather than from a metropolis down. Colonial politics were resolutely
local. “One might almost say that, in the beginning, each town was an
independent nation,” Tocqueville notes. Local citizens elected their
magistrates, levied and collected their own taxes, raised their own
militias, maintained their own roads, provided for their own poor, and,
in New England at least, established their own schools and made their
children attend them. In New England, too, they did this directly, not
through representatives, so, despite their Puritan individualism, they
learned from the start how to cooperate. “As in Athens, matters
affecting everyone’s interests were discussed in public places and in
general assemblies of citizens.” These local institutions, Tocqueville
judges, “foster a taste for liberty among the people and teach them the
art of being free.” In a self-reinforcing cycle, an “American learns
about the law by participating in the making of it. He teaches himself
about the forms of government by governing. He watches the great work of
society being done every day before his eyes and, in a sense, by his
hand.” He becomes a free citizen by practicing the duties of
citizenship.
Tocqueville saw that the Puritans’ religiosity remained, two centuries later, an undiminished force in American life.
One of those duties is jury service, which shapes the national
character by giving citizens firsthand respect for equity and the rule
of law. Since most people won’t be criminals but everybody can be sued,
civil jury duty especially highlights the idea of responsibility for
one’s actions and teaches everyone to think like a magistrate. And a
jury, notes Tocqueville, is “above all a political institution . . . a
form of popular sovereignty.” Going back to Magna Carta and beyond, as
the Founding Fathers liked to say (though Tocqueville does not mention),
juries are the last defense of the citizen’s rights against the
sovereign’s power. As “the most energetic form of popular rule,” says
Tocqueville, the jury “is also the most effective means of teaching the
people how to rule.” Moreover, because lawyers, who play so large a role
in politics, compose a respected, quasi-corporate body, they also form a
mediating buffer between the citizen and the state, with their
essentially conservative love of order and formalities.
A century and a half after the Puritan settlers established the
little republics of New England, the Constitution carefully preserved
the spirit of localism in its federal structure. Congress takes charge
of such national matters as foreign relations, war, and international
trade, but, lacking any means of knowing the innumerable details of
local needs and customs, as Friedrich Hayek later argued about the
inevitable failings of centralization, it leaves local matters to the
state legislatures and the town meetings. “So feeble and limited is the
share of government left to the administration, and so much does the
latter reflect its popular origins and obey the power from which it
emanates,” Tocqueville concludes, “that it is fair to say that the
people govern themselves.”
Tocqueville also saw that the Puritans’ religiosity remained, two
centuries later, an undiminished force in American life. It still kept
the spiritual realm and its values vibrantly present in minds otherwise
materialistic. When an American strikes out into the wilderness to make
his fortune, his Bible always goes with him, along with the religious
habit of his heart, with its “moral truths.” Tocqueville stresses that
religion retains its vitality in America because it has “remained
entirely distinct from the political order.” For when religions meddle
in politics and take political stands, theirs is but one more mere
opinion, subject to disagreement and derision. Thus if clerics make
political pronouncements, “they run the risk of not being believed about
anything”—as has happened to mainstream Protestantism in our
post–William Sloane Coffin era and, much more tragically, to the black
church when it embraced social justice instead of salvation, depriving
its community of an indispensable moral guide. Because religion’s moral
teaching is so critical to democracies in the age of enlightenment, and
its moral authority is so potentially precarious, Tocqueville says, “I
would rather chain priests inside their sanctuaries than allow them to
venture out.” As nothing is perfect in human affairs,
Tocqueville of course paints the inevitable shadows into his otherwise
sunny panorama. Powering the frenzy of American activity is a
high-voltage charge of anxiety. After the Revolution, most states
outlawed entail, the inheritance rule that the owner of an estate must
leave it to his eldest male heir, with pittances to the other children.
Henceforth property got divided and redivided more or less equally, with
the result now that “the families of the great landowners have almost
all been absorbed into the common mass,” Tocqueville observes, and even
fallen “into the uttermost depths of obscurity.” America thus has almost
no permanently rich families: “wealth circulates there with incredible
rapidity, and . . . it is rare for two successive generations to garner
its favors.” This leveling force generates “that restlessness of the
heart which is natural to men when, all conditions being almost equal,
each person sees the same chance of rising.” With everyone feverishly
striving, though, whenever some individual manages to shoot up out of
the mass to wealth and power, his fellows respond with envy and wonder
if he’s a crook. The result is an “odious mingling of the ideas of
baseness and power, unworthiness and success, utility and dishonor.”
So while democracy often gives rise to “a manly and legitimate
passion for equality that spurs all men to wish to be strong and
esteemed,” it can also lead weak men “to want to bring the strong down
to their level”—with such base fervor as ultimately to defeat
democracy’s purpose by “preferring equality in servitude to inequality
in freedom.”
In any event, all the striving intensifies Puritan individualism to
an extreme where it “disposes each citizen to cut himself off from the
mass of his fellow men,” leaving “the larger society to take care of
itself,” Tocqueville writes. “These people owe nothing to anyone. . . .
Thus not only does democracy cause each man to forget his forebears, but
it makes it difficult to see his offspring and cuts him off from his
contemporaries. Again and again it leads him back to himself and
threatens ultimately to imprison him altogether in the loneliness of his
own heart.”
American equality and materialism don’t provide fertile ground for
deep thought, either. As people increasingly resemble one another, each
man intellectually “feels weaker vis-à-vis all the others” and “loses
confidence in himself when they combat him.” He finds it “very difficult
to believe what the masses reject and to profess what they condemn,”
and usually he ends up “admitting he is wrong when most people say he
is.” Public opinion bears all before it in America; its power is one of
Tocqueville’s prime examples in a chapter he heads with James Madison’s
epithet “the tyranny of the majority.” So irresistible is its force that
Tocqueville can think of “no country where there is in general less
independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America.” Such intellectual tyranny weighs most
heavily on writers and politicians. With no need for the racks and
chains of old, democracy’s very mild tyranny “ignores the body and goes
straight for the soul,” Tocqueville laments. It leaves the dissident his
life, liberty, property, and civic privileges, but it makes them
useless to him by making him a pariah, unable to gain the votes or the
esteem of his fellow citizens, who will shun him for fear of being
shunned themselves. Little wonder, therefore, that America has produced
no great writers. And if you want a refutation of the wisdom of
crowds—the “theory of equality applied to intelligence,” Tocqueville
scoffs—look no further. As someone who believes that “freedom of the
intellect is a sacred thing,” as Tocqueville does, “when I feel the hand
of power weigh upon my brow, it scarcely matters who my oppressor is,
and I am not more inclined to submit to the yoke because a million arms
are prepared to place it around my neck.”
Given the threat of majoritarian tyranny, . . . a centralized administration would pose a fearful danger.
That same majoritarian tyranny explains why America’s elected
officials are so mediocre. To win votes, they have to flatter public
opinion with the obsequiousness of Louis XIV’s most sycophantic
courtiers. Andrew Jackson is Tocqueville’s Exhibit A. He “is the slave
of the majority,” Tocqueville sneers; “he obeys its wishes and desires
and heeds its half-divulged instincts; or rather, he divines what the
majority wants, anticipating its desires before it knows what they are
in order to place himself at its head.” Like most politicians, he cares
only about reelection, so that “his own individual interest supplants
the general interest in his mind.” His (ultimately successful) vendetta
against the Second Bank of the United States is a perfect example. Even
though it inestimably benefits the nation by ensuring its monetary
stability, Jackson happily attacks it, accusing its directors of being
an aristocracy in the making, opposed to the democratic majority—and,
incidentally, to Jackson as well. But of course, Jackson’s Democrats,
the party that stands for the infinite expansion of the power of the
people, have a permanent majority over the rival Federalists, who could
win election only when the country needed to navigate the perils of the
Founding, a unique emergency that prompted the Federalist Party’s
superior men to accept public office.
However, the modest scrap of elitism that remains in America does the
country much good, Tocqueville judges. By contrast with the House of
Representatives, where you see local lawyers or businessmen “of vulgar
appearance”—or even Tennessee congressman “David Crockett, who had
received no education, could read only with difficulty,” and “spent his
time hunting, selling his game for a living, and spending his whole life
in the woods”—the Senate throngs with “eloquent attorneys,
distinguished generals, clever magistrates, and well-known statesmen.
Every word uttered in this assembly would do honor to Europe’s greatest
parliamentary debates.” Why the difference? The people directly elect
their congressmen, while the popularly elected state legislatures elect
the senators, a two-step process that refines and ennobles the choice
and that Tocqueville recommends for democracies everywhere. But note, he
remarks, that even the best democracy will give you a broadly
prosperous nation, with little real misery, rather than a brilliant one. Part of the genius of the U.S. Constitution,
Tocqueville thinks, is that it not only prevents Congress from making
laws for localities but also provides no central administrative system
that could carry them out if they existed. Given the threat of
majoritarian tyranny, such as reigns over U.S. public opinion, such a
centralized administration would pose a fearful danger. If the central
power could not only issue orders and frame general principles but also
carry them out in detail, if it could reach down and seize the
individual by the collar, “then liberty would soon be banished from the
New World,” Tocqueville asserts.
But hang on! From a glowing panorama, to some gathering shadows, to this? What makes him say this—and then harp on it as the keynote of volume 2 of Democracy?
After all, as he himself observes, even no past European sovereign was
ever powerful or absolute enough “to subject all his people
indiscriminately to the minute details of a uniform code, or . . . to
dictate and manage the lives of each and every one of them.” Such an
idea “never occurred to the mind of man.” So why bring it up?
Yet, as Tocqueville discovered in his researches for The Old Regime and the French Revolution, not only did such an idea arise under many a royal crown, but a long progression of sovereigns gradually made it a reality. By no means a democrat by birth, Tocqueville lived in this chateâu in Normandy. (1CLIC / PHOTO12 / THE IMAGE WORKS)Here, briefly, is how. During the fourteenth
century, no taxation without consent was as firm a principle in France
as in England. But around 1440, Charles VII sweet-talked the nobles into
pushing the Estates-General to let him levy a new tax, the taille, at his pleasure—a tax from which the nobles would be exempt. As the taille
increased, amplifying the injustice of taxing the poor rather than the
rich, so did the people’s resentment of the exempt aristocrats, who had
hitherto been their protectors and patrons, especially in times of
dearth. And as the nobles gradually sold off their land, tied their
fates to the central government by investing the proceeds in its bonds,
and moved to Paris, they ceased to feel any obligation or concern for
their former tenants, ceding their role as a revered corporate body that
once had mediated between the people and the sovereign. An analogous
process occurred in the towns over the same period, as municipal
corporations became petty oligarchies, uninterested in ordinary
citizens, who, in turn, stopped caring about their town’s welfare and
didn’t bother to turn up at the rigged elections—where elections still
existed.
What filled the power vacuum was the Royal Council, an ancient body
that, by the eighteenth century, had become supreme, with a Controller
General as its executive officer, and faceless bureaucrats, who shunned
publicity and beavered away silently in the shadow of the throne, as its
members. The Controller General administered the entire nation through
30 intendants, one per province. Obscure middle-class functionaries like
the Royal Councilors, they and their subdelegates apportioned and
collected the taille in every parish, managed poor relief in
every town and village, and, as the eighteenth century progressed, tried
to teach peasants scientific agriculture, told them where they could
plant this or that crop, and built and maintained roads and canals. Says
Tocqueville, “There was in France no township, borough, village, or
hamlet, however small, no hospital, factory, convent, or college which
had a right to manage its own affairs as it thought fit or administer
its possessions without interference.” Moreover, each intendant had
brigades of mounted police to keep order, arrest vagrants and beggars,
and quell riots. Scots-born John Law, named Controller General in 1720,
marveled that until he took office, “I could hardly believe such a state
of affairs existed. Believe it or not, the French kingdom is ruled by
thirty Intendants.”
True, the old, independent legal system still stood protectively
between the sovereign and the citizen, even after he had lost the aegis
of the lord and the town corporation. Kings couldn’t fire or transfer
judges; instead, they found a way simply to bypass them. They set up
special courts, dependent on royal favor, to try any case involving the
king’s authority or interest. Throughout the eighteenth century,
moreover, royal decrees and orders from the Royal Council declared that
any disputes that resulted from them would be heard by the intendant,
with a right of appeal to . . . the Royal Council. And any case
concerning the administration not covered by such a council order could
be summarily snatched out of the ordinary courts and transferred to the
intendant’s jurisdiction by a so-called evocation. The intendants and
their subdelegates were exempt from personal lawsuits, making them
untouchable.
Even private property lost its sanctity, when Louis XIV promulgated
the long-held but judicially rejected feudal belief that all landed
estates were held conditionally and that their true owner was the state.
So the highway department never hesitated as it extended France’s
highway system in the eighteenth century to use eminent domain with gay
abandon to drive roads straight and true through anybody’s parkland. And
the state gradually swept into its coffers donations willed to
charitable institutions over centuries, until in 1780 the king seized
the ancient endowments of the hospitals, in return for a government
annuity. “It never seemed to cross anyone’s mind,” Tocqueville drily
remarks, “that the surest way of training people to violate the rights
of the living is to set at nought the wishes of the dead.”
The result was that the “former ruling class retained their rank and
titles, but all effective authority was gradually withdrawn from them,”
as the kings built up “a massive, four-square structure rising from the
wreckage of the half-demolished institutions of the past,” creating
“modern institutions . . . within the shattered framework of the feudal
system.” And to most Frenchmen, the sweeping transformation—a real
French revolution—long remained invisible, even though the functionaries
had ensnared the country in a net of regulations and smothered it with
forms to be filled out. By the mid-eighteenth century, some of
France’s most advanced thinkers—the Physiocrats, whom we remember today
as laissez-faire economists—clearly perceived this gigantic governmental
machinery and began speculating about the social uses to which it could
be put, anticipating not only the whole program of the French
Revolution, Tocqueville notes, but also “the subversive theories of what
is today known as socialism” and anticipating as well (as he could not
know) an almost Leninist totalitarianism. For “socialism and
centralization thrive on the same soil; they stand to each other as the
cultivated to the wild species of a fruit,” Tocqueville presciently
observed.
The Physiocrats were opposed “to deliberative assemblies, to
secondary organizations vested with local powers,” and indeed to all
mediating institutions, “however venerable and well-founded,” used “by
free peoples . . . to curb the domination of a central authority,”
Tocqueville writes. Similarly, theories of the separation of
governmental powers, one Physiocrat wrote, were “the merest moonshine.”
They liked their state power straight.
They would use it to abolish “all class distinctions, all differences
of rank.” The “nation was to be composed of individuals almost exactly
alike and unconditionally equal,” writes Tocqueville, “even if equality
spelled servitude.” They would do away with private property,
prescribing life imprisonment for anyone trying to reintroduce it.
Everything would be produced under state supervision, placed in state
warehouses, and distributed to citizens according to need. All towns
would be identically laid out, and all houses the same (for
architectural totalitarianism is totalitarianism’s handmaiden). “At the
age of five,” wrote one Physiocrat in 1755, “children shall be taken
from their parents and educated communally at government expense and on
uniform lines.” For, wrote another, as if predicting the advent of New
Soviet Man, “The state makes men exactly what it wishes them to be.” And
what it wants, wrote the most famous of the Physiocrats, Anne Robert
Jacques Turgot, who rose from intendant to Controller General in 1774,
is “young men trained to do their duty by the State; patriotic and
law-abiding.”
That giant state machinery was there for Napoleon to create his million-man army and seek to conquer all Europe.
By 1789, France was a “servile state” that had lost its understanding
of liberty. Even Turgot’s friend Voltaire, who so admired English
freedom of speech and the press during his London exile from 1726 to
1728, didn’t realize that the freedom he praised depended on the
political freedom that “left him indifferent,” Tocqueville writes—even
though he was in London because of despotism at home. Another Frenchman
in London, Tocqueville wryly reports, spluttered in amazement, “It is
the literal truth that the average Englishman consoles himself for
having been robbed with the reflection that at any rate his country has
no mounted police!” Remarks Tocqueville, “It never occurred to him that
these ‘eccentricities’ were bound up with the whole British concept of
freedom.” So when the 1789 revolutionaries, constitutional monarchists
whom Tocqueville thinks patriotic, unselfish, magnanimous, but woefully
inexperienced, set about “transforming the social system, root and
branch, and regenerating the whole human race,” they had no idea that
since Louis XII, French kings had been “dividing men so as the better to
rule them” and that by the end of the eighteenth century, “it would
have been impossible to find . . . even ten men used to acting in
concert and defending their interests without appealing to the central
power for aid.” Nor was there even any personal affection to support the
king and aristocracy against the overwhelming, all-devouring resentment
of the people. So the ancient monarchy came crashing down, and there
was nothing to stop the demons “who carried audacity to the point of
sheer insanity” and “acted with unprecedented ruthlessness.”
And they could do so because the centralized machinery was in place
to carry the reign of terror throughout the nation. “The same conditions
which had precipitated the fall of the monarchy made for the absolutism
of its successor.” That giant state machinery was there for Napoleon in
turn to create his million-man army and set forth to conquer all
Europe. And it was still there in 1856, when The Old Regime
appeared, and when “the French nation [was] prepared to tolerate in a
government that favors and flatters its desire for equality practices
and principles that are, in fact, the tools of despotism.” As he wrote volume 2 of Democracy,
and especially as he struggled with its conclusion during his first few
months in the Chamber of Deputies, Tocqueville perceived the outlines of
this French reality and intuited its inextricable connection with the
rise of democratic equality, but he hadn’t yet reached a systematic
understanding of it. But his were the intuitions of genius, and what he
foresaw came to pass not only in Europe but also in the United States,
starting half a century after his death.
He liked America’s administrative decentralization—in the 1830s,
there were only 12,000-odd U.S. officials, as against France’s
138,000—for its political and cultural effects: “People care about their
country’s interests as though they were their own,” he noted. “In its
successes they see their own work and are exalted by it.” Matters are
different today, now that the federal government has more than 2.7
million employees, state and local governments have 14.3 million, and
college students don’t know who won the Civil War or who the U.S. vice
president is, and don’t care. Americans have come to resemble the French
of Tocqueville’s day, who don’t know what’s happening in their country,
are “indifferent to the fate of the place they live in,” and think that
the fate of their town and the safety of their streets “have nothing to
do with them, that they belong to some powerful stranger called ‘the
government.’ ”
As happened in France, a gigantic modern state grew up inside the
shell of America’s Founding-era institutions, with few Americans even
noticing and most unaware of the magnitude of the revolution even today.
We created a giant administrative regime, just as Tocqueville feared,
composed of such executive-branch agencies as the Interstate Commerce
Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the Environmental Protection
Agency, the Federal Elections Commission, and on and on.
As the Physiocrats would have wanted, these agencies don’t bother
with the “moonshine” of the separation of powers or due process of law
that Tocqueville ranked so high among America’s political virtues and
that Woodrow Wilson classed among the “great deal of nonsense” that the
Founding Fathers put forth as “the inalienable rights of the
individual.” These executive-branch agencies legislate by making binding
rules for individuals and corporations, and they then adjudicate and
punish infractions of them through juryless administrative courts
indistinguishable from those run by the French intendants and the Royal
Council, lacking due process and usually with no appeal to the real
court system. They provide, to use Tocqueville’s words, “an image of
justice rather than justice itself.” Nor, as in the ancien régime, can
the victims of these agencies’ absolutism sue them or their
functionaries. As for the congress whose legislation gave life to these
bodies, it is as much a sham as the old French town corporations or
magnificently titled nobles. It does little but seek exemptions from the
agencies’ rules for corporate donors—whose companies the agencies’
original rationale was to control. And the Constitution that gave life
to the government Tocqueville so cherished is, if not dead, then dying. What’s more, this Second American Revolution
occurred under just the rationale that Tocqueville predicted.
Democratic citizens, he wrote, “are willing enough to grant that the
power that represents society possesses far 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 guide him.”
Accordingly, President Wilson set the administrative state in motion in
the name of disinterested government by nonpolitical experts, armed with
science, statistics, and professionalism, who, laboring away quietly
and selflessly, would advance the common good so much more efficiently
than the free action of the collective power of individuals.
And when the New Deal took administrative government to new depths of
unconstitutionality, Franklin Roosevelt and his brain trust used almost
Tocquevillian language in explaining why, in the age of giant
corporations more powerful than any individual citizen or mediating
institution, only an equally mighty government could protect the wee,
timorous, cowering individual. “Thus the industrial class needs to be
regulated, supervised, and restrained,” wrote Tocqueville, “and it is
natural for the prerogatives of government to grow along with it.” The
argument will be, Tocqueville predicted, that “as citizens become weaker
and less capable, government must be made more skillful and active, so
that society can take upon itself what individuals are no longer capable
of doing on their own”—a sentiment that could have come from one of
FDR’s fireside chats. “Entrenched greed,” charged FDR in 1936, “will
take the course of every autocracy of the past—power for themselves,
enslavement for the public.”
Tocqueville couldn’t find a precise enough name for the new
oppressiveness that he saw coming into being—saw with a shiver, like
those who witness, wondering and secretly afraid, the demonic power of
an atom bomb explosion, or like astronauts watching the Earth become an
ever smaller blue ball as they hurtle into the silent void, seeing what
hitherto only God has seen. “ ‘Despotism’ and ‘tyranny’ will not do.” He
groped for a description that would adequately convey the almost
otherworldly force he glimpsed in outline, a presence like something out
of science fiction, human and yet inhuman.
Over today’s swarming millions of equal, materialistic, utterly
isolated individuals, he wrote, “stands an immense tutelary power, which
assumes sole responsibility for securing their pleasure and watching
over their fate.” This new kind of sovereign, “after taking individuals
one by one in his powerful hands and kneading them to his liking,” will
spread over society “a fine mesh of uniform, minute, and complex rules,”
which constrain even the best and brightest. “He does not break men’s
wills but softens, bends, and guides them. He seldom forces anyone to
act but consistently opposes action. He does not destroy things but
rather prevents them from coming into being. Rather than tyrannize, he
inhibits, represses, saps, stultifies, and in the end reduces each
nation to nothing but a timid and industrious flock of animals, with the
government as its shepherd.”
Today the iron cage of administrative rules prevents new businesses from opening, and old ones from hiring.
Under the New Deal’s mesh of minute and complex rules, the
sovereign—with the Supreme Court’s blessing—punished a farmer in 1942
for growing grain in excess of his allotted quota, to feed to his own
livestock. Today the iron cage of administrative rules prevents new
businesses from opening, old ones from hiring, doctors from treating
patients as they think best, groups of citizens from uttering political
speech, even a landowner from moving a pile of sand from one spot to
another on his property, purportedly because it could affect a navigable
waterway 50 miles away. It slows projects to a crawl, so that building a
bridge, a skyscraper, a power plant takes years—whereas in the old
America, the Empire State Building rose in 11 months.
And today’s sovereign does force men to act as well as
suppressing action, so that nuns must provide their employees with birth
control that their religion holds to be sinful, bakers must make cakes
celebrating homosexual marriages that their religious beliefs abominate,
private colleges must regulate their students’ sex lives, banks must
lend to deadbeats. The immense tutelary power has turned private
charities into government contractors, so that Catholic Charities or
Jewish Social Services are neither Catholic nor Jewish—though most
public welfare comes direct from the state, from babies’ milk to old
people’s health care and pensions, for which only a minority has paid.
As Tocqueville observed, “It is the state that has undertaken virtually
alone to give bread to the hungry, aid and shelter to the sick, and work
to the idle.” In New York State, where even in the 1830s Tocqueville
saw administrative centralization taking form, the sovereign has
commanded strictly private clubs to change their admissions criteria, so
that even the realm of private association is subject to government
power. And whatever traditional American mores defined as good and bad,
moral and immoral, base and praiseworthy, the sovereign has redefined
and redefined until all such ideas have lost their meaning. Is it any
wonder that today’s Americans feel that they have no say in how they are
governed—or that they don’t understand how that came about? Such oppression is “less degrading” in
democracies because, since the citizens elect the sovereign, “each
citizen, hobbled and reduced to impotence though he may be, can still
imagine that in obeying he is only submitting to himself.” Moreover,
democratic citizens love equality more than liberty, and the love of
equality grows as equality itself expands. Don’t let him have or be more
than me. “The only necessary condition for centralizing public power in
a democratic society is to love equality or to make a show of loving
it. Thus the science of despotism,” Tocqueville despairingly concluded,
“can be reduced . . . to a single principle.”
But, wonders Tocqueville, is this what human life is for?
Myron Magnet, City Journal’s editor-at-large and its editor from 1994 through 2006, is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. His latest book is The Founders at Home.
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Permito-me referir estes dois artigos meus, ambos no blog Diplomatizzando:
