WHAT KIND OF DESPOTISM DEMOCRATIC NATIONS HAVE TO FEAR
DURING my stay in the United States I had observed that a democratic social state similar to that of the Americans might make it unusually easy to establish despotism, and on my return to Europe I saw how many of our princes had already made use of ideas, sentiments, and needs engendered by that same social state in order to enlarge their sphere of power.
This led me to the thought that Christian nations might ultimately fall victim to oppression similar to that which once weighed on a number of peoples of Antiquity.
A more detailed examination of the subject and five years of new meditations have not diminished my fears but have changed their focus.
In centuries past, no sovereign was ever so absolute and so powerful as to undertake to administer by himself, and without the assistance of secondary powers, all the parts of a great empire. No ruler ever attempted to subject all his people indiscriminately to the minute details of a uniform code, or descended to their level to dictate and manage the lives of each and every one of them. The idea of such an undertaking never occurred to the mind of man, and had anyone conceived of such a thing, the want of enlightenment, the imperfection of administrative procedures, and above all the natural obstacles created by the inequality of conditions would soon have halted the execution of such a vast design.
When the power of the Caesars was at its height, the various peoples that inhabited the Roman world preserved their diverse customs and mores: though subject to the same monarch, most of the provinces were separately administered. Powerful and active municipalities were everywhere, and even though all the government of the empire was concentrated in the hands of the emperor alone, and he remained, when necessary, the arbiter of all things, the details of social life and of individual existence ordinarily escaped his control.
To be sure, the emperors wielded vast power without any counterweight, which enabled them to freely indulge their most bizarre penchants and to use the entire force of the state to gratify them. Often they abused this power to deprive a citizen arbitrarily of his property or his life. Their tyranny weighed mightily on a few, but it did not extend to a large number. It fastened on certain great objectives as primary and neglected the rest; it was violent and limited.
If despotism were to establish itself in today’s democratic nations, it would probably have a different character. It would be more extensive and more mild, and it would degrade men without tormenting them.*
I have no doubt that in centuries of enlightenment and equality like our own, it will be easier for sovereigns to gather all public powers into their hands alone and to penetrate the sphere of private interests more deeply and regularly than any sovereign of Antiquity was ever able to do. But the same equality that facilitates despotism also tempers it. As men become increasingly similar and more and more equal, we have seen how public mores become milder and more humane. When no citizen has great power or wealth, tyranny in a sense lacks both opportunity and a stage. Since all fortunes are modest, passions are naturally contained, the imagination is limited, and pleasures are simple. This universal moderation moderates the sovereign himself and confines the erratic impulses of his desire within certain limits.
Quite apart from these reasons, which derive from the very nature of the social state, I could add many others, but to do so would take me far afield, and I prefer to remain within the limit that I have set for myself.
Democratic governments may become violent and even cruel in certain moments of great effervescence and great peril, but such crises will be rare and temporary.
When I think of the petty passions of men today, of the softness of their mores, the extent of their enlightenment, the purity of their religion, and the mildness of their morality, of their laborious and orderly habits, and of the restraint that nearly all of them maintain in vice as well as in virtue, what I fear is not that they will find tyrants among their leaders but rather that they will find protectors.
I therefore believe that the kind of oppression that threatens democratic peoples is unlike any the world has seen before. Our contemporaries will find no image of it in their memories. I search in vain for an expression that exactly reproduces my idea of it and captures it fully. The old words “despotism” and “tyranny” will not do. The thing is new, hence I must try to define it, since I cannot give it a name.
I am trying to imagine what new features despotism might have in today’s world: I see an innumerable host of men, all alike and equal, endlessly hastening after petty and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn into himself, is virtually a stranger to the fate of all the others. For him, his children and personal friends comprise the entire human race. As for the remainder of his fellow citizens, he lives alongside them but does not see them. He touches them but does not feel them. He exists only in himself and for himself, and if he still has a family, he no longer has a country.
Over these men stands an immense tutelary power, which assumes sole responsibility for securing their pleasure and watching over their fate. It is absolute, meticulous, regular, provident, and mild. It would resemble paternal authority if only its purpose were the same, namely, to prepare men for manhood. But on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them in childhood irrevocably. It likes citizens to rejoice, provided they think only of rejoicing. It works willingly for their happiness but wants to be the sole agent and only arbiter of that happiness. It provides for their security, foresees and takes care of their needs, facilitates their pleasures, manages their most important affairs, directs their industry, regulates their successions, and divides their inheritances. Why not relieve them entirely of the trouble of thinking and the difficulty of living?
Every day it thus makes man’s use of his free will rarer and more futile. It circumscribes the action of the will more narrowly, and little by little robs each citizen of the use of his own faculties. Equality paved the way for all these things by preparing men to put up with them and even to look upon them as a boon.
The sovereign, after taking individuals one by one in his powerful hands and kneading them to his liking, reaches out to embrace society as a whole. Over it he spreads a fine mesh of uniform, minute, and complex rules, through which not even the most original minds and most vigorous souls can poke their heads above the crowd. 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 prevents them from coming into being. Rather than tyrannize, he inhibits, represses, saps, stifles, and stultifies, and in the end he reduces each nation to nothing but a flock of timid and industrious animals, with the government as its shepherd.
I have always believed that this kind of servitude — the regulated, mild, peaceful servitude that I have just described — could be combined more easily than one might imagine with some of the external forms of liberty, and that it would not be impossible for it to establish itself in the shadow of popular sovereignty itself.
Our contemporaries are constantly wracked by two warring passions: they feel the need to be led and the desire to remain free. Unable to destroy either of these contrary instincts, they seek to satisfy both at once. They imagine a single, omnipotent, tutelary power, but one that is elected by the citizens. They combine centralization with popular sovereignty. This gives them some respite. They console themselves for being treated as wards by imagining that they have chosen their own protectors. Each individual allows himself to be clapped in chains because he sees that the other end of the chain is held not by a man or a class but by the people themselves.
In this system citizens emerge from dependence for a moment to indicate their master and then return to it.
There are many people nowadays who adjust quite easily to a compromise of this kind between administrative despotism and popular sovereignty and who believe that they have done enough to guarantee the liberty of individuals when in fact they have surrendered that liberty to the national government. That is not enough for me. The nature of the master matters far less to me than the fact of obedience.
I will not deny, however, that a constitution of this kind is infinitely preferable to one that concentrates all powers and then deposits them in the hands of an irresponsible man or body. Of all the various forms that democratic despotism might take, that would surely be the worst.
When the sovereign is elected or closely supervised by a truly elective and independent legislature, he may in some cases subject individuals to greater oppression, but that oppression is always less degrading because each citizen, hobbled and reduced to impotence though he may be, can still imagine that in obeying he is only submitting to himself, and that it is to one of his wills that he is sacrificing all the others.
I also understand that when the sovereign represents the nation and is dependent on it, the forces and rights that are taken from each citizen not only serve the head of state but profit the state itself, and that private individuals derive some fruit from the sacrifice of their independence to the public.
To create a national representation in a highly centralized country is therefore to diminish but not to destroy the harm that extreme centralization may do.
Clearly, individual intervention in the most important matters can be preserved in this way, but it is no less ruthlessly expunged in smaller and private matters. What people forget is that it is above all in matters of detail that the subjugation of men becomes dangerous. I, for one, should be inclined to believe that liberty is less necessary in great things than in lesser ones if I thought that one could ever be assured of one without possessing the other.
Subjection in lesser affairs manifests itself daily and is felt by all citizens indiscriminately. It does not make them desperate, but it does constantly thwart their will and lead them to give up on expressing it. In this way it gradually smothers their spirit and saps their soul, whereas obedience, which is required only in a limited number of very serious but very rare circumstances, only occasionally points up the existence of servitude, whose weight only certain men must bear. In vain will you ask the same citizens whom you have made so dependent on the central government to choose the representatives of that government from time to time. This use of their freedom to choose — so important yet so brief and so rare — will not prevent them from slowly losing the ability to think, feel, and act on their own and thus from sinking gradually beneath the level of humanity.
Furthermore, they will soon become incapable of exercising the one great privilege they have left. The democratic peoples that have introduced liberty in the political sphere while increasing despotism in the administrative sphere have been led into some very peculiar kinds of behavior. When it is necessary to deal with minor affairs in which simple common sense would suffice, they deem their citizens incapable of it, but when it is a matter of governing the entire state, they grant those same citizens vast prerogatives. They treat them alternately as playthings of the sovereign and as his masters, as more than kings yet less than men. After trying out all the various systems of election without finding one that suits them, they are surprised and keep on looking, as if the ills they see did not have far more to do with the constitution of the country than with that of the electoral body.
It is indeed difficult to imagine how men who have entirely renounced the habit of managing their own affairs could be successful in choosing those who ought to lead them. It is impossible to believe that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever emerge from the ballots of a nation of servants.
The possibility of a constitution’s being republican in its head and ultramonarchical in all of its other parts has always struck me as an ephemeral monster. The vices of those who govern and the imbecility of the governed would quickly bring about its ruin, and the people, tired of their representatives and of themselves, would either create freer institutions or soon return to prostrating themselves at the feet of a single master.*
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* See Note XXVI, page 869.
* See Note XXVII, page 869.