Nothing reduces the value of discussion about modern political thought more than the contrast commonly drawn between ‘liberalism’
and ‘socialism’. That contrast has become simpliste and misleading. It has come to be made in a way that neglects the richness of liberal thought in the nineteenth century,
and ignores the extent to which modes of argument and themes which are usually assigned to ‘socialism’ formed an important
part of liberal thought in that period. Indeed, some of these modes of argument and themes were introduced by liberal thinkers, and only later adopted by socialist writers. To that extent, it is fair to say that the conventional
contrast between the two traditions is particularly unfair to liberalism – excluding from it some of its own progeny. Even
at first glance, the contrast between liberalism and socialism seems inadequate. To say that the two traditions give priority
to different concepts – liberty in the one case, equality in the other – fails to make clear the sense in which liberalism
is itself rooted in the concept of ‘natural’ equality. The presumption in favour of equal treatment, built into the framework
of ideas in Contract Theory, meant that no man had a moral obligation to obey another as such – that is, the right to command
and the duty to obey were no longer written into hereditary social roles as in a caste society. Thus, the fundamental or root
concept of liberalism is equality, and its commitment to liberty springs from that.
In the same way, the commonplace view that liberalism is sociologically naive – that it is a priori and unhistorical in its
mode of argument when compared to ‘historical materialism’ – is untenable. That commonplace view neglects two things. First,
it neglects the sense in which socialism is itself a priori and parasitic on the norms of liberal theory, especially the Contract
School of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, for its commitment to human equality (Rousseau’s
Discourse on the Origins of Inequality played an important role in that transmission). Second, the view that liberalism is sociologically naive neglects the fact
that it
was liberal thinkers of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century who began to reject ‘the state of nature’ as the
proper starting point for political argument and developed instead the first systematic theories of social change. The narrowing
or ‘hardening’ of the concept of law in Contract Theory – with the help of arguments about sovereignty and law as command
– had made possible a much clearer distinction between
les lois and
les mœurs, between political and social structures. Liberals like Montesquieu and Turgot were the first to begin to use these concepts
independently, and to draw attention to the importance of social change.
Why do these things go unrecognized today? What has given rise to the misleading contrast drawn between liberalism and socialism?
One development especially, I think. One strand of the liberal tradition has been emphasized to the exclusion of another.
Yet the other is in many ways the richer tradition. To oversimplify somewhat, these two traditions can be described as the
English and French traditions. What I shall argue is that the standard picture of liberalism is derived almost entirely from
English liberal thought, and neglects French liberal thought – with the result that our picture of the development of both
liberalism and socialism is distorted.
Many of the criticisms commonly directed at ‘liberalism’ apply chiefly to the English liberal tradition. What are the most
important of these criticisms? At least three must be considered. First, it is often alleged that liberalism involves an impoverished
concept of the person; that it overlooks the social nature of man. This criticism is closely connected to recent discussion
about methodological individualism – to criticism of a mode of argument which postulates an atomized, unhistorical individual
who looks (to many socialist thinkers at least) suspiciously like an entrepreneurial type fostered by nascent capitalist society.
In effect, the criticism is that liberal thought neglects to explore the influence of social conditions on the agent – that
it neglects the socializing process.
The second, closely related criticism of liberalism is that it shirks the hard work of understanding how changing social relations
and attitudes reflect or spring from changes in the mode of production. On this view, one of the constant features of liberal
thought is its preoccupation with the political or legal sphere and its neglect of civil society. Finally, a third criticism
of liberalism is that it has an inadequate concept of liberty or liberation. Here the argument is that in its concern to define
criteria that will create and protect a sphere of private action (and limit the sphere of legitimate state action), liberalism
fails to appreciate the moralizing role of political participation – the fulfilment which the performance of civic duty brings.
The vulnerability of English liberal thought to these criticisms – which I do not deny – results largely from its close association
with empiricist philosophy.
1 From Locke to J. S. Mill leading English liberals found their vocation as philosophers of mind and based their political
arguments on the empiricist (or sensationalist) theory of knowledge. Now by far the most striking thing about empiricist epistemology
during that period is that it was exercised by the problem of individual knowledge of the natural world. The central questions
posed were: how does the individual mind acquire knowledge of the external world, and how can we be sure that such knowledge
is accurate? These questions had been stimulated by developments in seventeenth-century natural science, and their elucidation
involved exploring the meaning of such ideas as ‘causation’ and ‘law’. The criteria of reliable knowledge which came to be
defined by Locke and Hume made observable regularities or uniformities of behaviour the test. True to its original inspiration
– the natural sciences – empiricist philosophy insisted on verification as the test of ‘true’ knowledge.
But that empiricist test for knowledge created a wholly new problem of social explanation. In retrospect, we can see that
what the first empiricists did was, in effect, to collapse the concept of ‘rules’ into that of empirical laws. Early empiricist
philosophy – or the sensationalist model of the mind – did not offer a satisfactory account of the nature of rule-governed
action. It did not explain the role of social norms in shaping individual intentions and making action possible. It did not
explore the dependence of the concept of the ‘self’ on a social context. Rousseau was one of the first to notice this weakness,
and struggled to remedy it, with mixed success. French social thinkers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century
took far more seriously questions about the origin of language and the sense in which society is a normative or rule-governed
(rather than merely causal) order. These questions preoccupied thinkers as different as Condillac, Rousseau, Bonald and Maistre.
They explored the conditions of social action: that is, the sense in which it is only possible to speak of individual motives and intentions by placing them in a context
of social rules. In effect, these French thinkers made the first real criticisms of methodological individualism in social
studies.
French liberals of the early nineteenth century benefited from that critique of empiricist philosophy. They adapted values
from earlier English liberals such as Locke to these new ideas about the social nature of man,
concerning themselves much less with the question of how the individual mind acquires accurate knowledge of the external or
natural world. Instead of being philosophers of mind, they tended to be historians or jurists. Instead of wrestling with the
problem of verification or induction, they took a keen interest in the socializing process. Instead of seeing history in terms
of the advance of science (here Comte and Mill were the true heirs of early empiricist philosophy), they were interested in
the changing forms of property rights, the social classes which such property rights created, and the conflict between classes.
Thus, whereas the earlier liberals moved from the problem of individual knowledge to a concern with individual rights and
interests, the French liberals of the early nineteenth century moved from interest in the socializing process to concern with
types of social organization. They began to develop models in order to identify and understand different types of society. And
they began to relate particular versions of political concepts to different social structures – as in Benjamin Constant’s
essay on ‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns’.
2As a result French liberals – Mme de Staël, Benjamin Constant; a group called the Doctrinaires that included Royer-Collard, Barante and Guizot; and, above all, Alexis de Tocqueville – took a step which was decisive for
the later development of political thought. In effect, they began to insist that political theory be founded on a theory of
social change. No political theory, they argued, could be founded merely on assumptions about an unchanging or essential human
nature or on assumptions about the contents of the human mind. In that sense, the French liberals rejected a deductive model
and substituted an inductive model for political theory – changing economic and social structures established constraints
within which political organization had to work. Given certain economic and social conditions, then only certain political
options were open. If, for example, the subdivision of property, the spread of education and social mobility had undermined
the caste system of feudal society, then aristocratic government on a quasi-feudal model was no longer possible.
That did not mean that economic and social conditions dictated one political outcome. The French liberals – especially the
Doctrinaires and Tocqueville – insisted on the reality of political choice, but
within limits. Those limits were imposed by ‘social structure’. Thus, the
Doctrinaires observed that the development of the state rested upon the weakening of
the feudal hierarchy, the rise of towns and growth of a market economy. But within the larger pattern they were also struck
by the different forms of the state and of political ideas which emerged in England and France. They began to explore the
sources of that difference.
It is not too much to claim that the Doctrinaires were the originators of a sociological approach to political theory. They were the first political thinkers who consistently
rejected the classical term ‘constitution’ as inadequate for political and social analysis. By distinguishing between laws
as commands (enforced by public power) and other social rules, they drew a distinction between political institutions and
social structure, and developed criteria for applying the latter concept – criteria such as the distribution of property,
education and social mobility. When referring to social structure, the Doctrinaires used terms such as la condition sociale, l’état social, etc. By drawing attention to changes in les mœurs and social conditions, the Doctrinaires insisted, in effect, on the limited efficacy of law. Ultimately, they argued, law is less powerful than les mœurs; it cannot be used successfully if it is turned against the whole ‘direction’ of social change. Law-makers become powerless
if they seek to overturn or ignore the division of labour in a society, the distribution of property and popular expectations.
In that sense, law-makers must accept a foundation of economic and social facts as given – seeking merely to modify rather
than overturn such a powerful concatenation of circumstances.
François Guizot spoke for the
Doctrinaires when he wrote in his
Essays on the History of France (1822):
It is by the study of political institutions that most writers … have sought to understand the state of a society, the degree
or type of its civilisation. It would have been wiser to study first the society itself in order to understand its political
institutions. Before becoming a cause, political institutions are an effect; a society produces them before being modified
by them. Thus, instead of looking to the system or forms of government in order to understand the state of the people, it
is the state of the people that must be examined first in order to know what must have been, what could have been its government
…
Society, its composition, the manner of life of individuals according to their social position, the relations of the different
classes, the conditions [
l’état] of persons especially – that is the first question which demands attention from … the inquirer who seeks to understand how
a people are governed.
3
Feudal institutions, Guizot argued, could only be understood in that way. The ownership of land carried with it the right
to govern its inhabitants.
The study of the condition of lands must thus precede that of the condition of persons. In order to understand the political
institutions, it is necessary to understand the different social conditions [classes] and their relations. In order to understand
the different social conditions, it is necessary to understand the nature and relations of properties.
4
In view of the emphasis by French liberals on property relations and class conflict, it is hardly surprising that Marx derived
not just historical information but social theory from Guizot and Tocqueville – those ‘bourgeois historians’ whom he went
out of his way to praise in later years. The pity is that by describing them simply as historians he obscured the nature of
his debt to them. Yet it was the Doctrinaires’ concept of social structure and their emphasis on the priority of economic change that gradually created a new mode of political
argument.
The role of the
Doctrinaires in creating a sociological basis for political theory has gone unnoticed. In fact, the credit has been claimed for two other
groups of thinkers – wrongly, I think. Marxists sometimes point to the theories of social change developed by eighteenth-century
Scots such as Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith as the origin of sociological argument. And it is perfectly true that what has
been called the ‘Four Stages’ theory – in which human development is traced through (a) hunting and gathering, (b) nomadic
and pastoral, (c) agricultural, and (d) commercial stages – represented an enormous breakthrough in understanding.
5 For the mode of subsistence is used to identify each stage, and other practices are related ‘functionally’ to it. Yet the
Scottish thinkers were not primarily interested in the problem of government. Their theories of social change are not designed
to explore political issues or to contribute to the solution of pressing political problems of their own time. Hence the universal
scope of their theories, which were not fashioned as a means of political reform. That is where the
Doctrinaires differ. They were faced with the problem of reconstructing French institutions – and especially government – after the Revolution.
Leading
Doctrinaires such as Royer-Collard and Guizot held important political posts under the Restoration. Hence their accounts of social change
were fashioned to throw light on the current predicament of France. In order to understand the new condition of French society,
they narrowed their accounts of social change to Western Europe since the early feudal period. They no longer attempted to
encompass the whole of human development. Rather, they sought to
understand how changes in the form of French government ‘sprang from’ social and economic changes, and, a fortiori, to what
extent the highly centralized state machine which the Restoration inherited from Napoleon was inevitable under modern social
conditions, or whether decentralization was possible. Thus, they sought to explore the structure of modern society – which
they began to call ‘democratic’ – with that political problem – centralization – constantly in mind.
Recently, still another group of thinkers has been given credit for creating modern sociological argument. In
The Sociological Tradition Robert Nisbet has laid great emphasis on the contribution of counter- revolutionary writers such as Burke, Bonald and Maistre
to the definition of the key differences between traditional and modern society.
6 It is certainly true that the counter-revolutionaries relentlessly criticized the methodological individualism (in the form
of natural rights theory) of the Enlightenment, and contributed to a more holist approach to the study of society. In particular,
they explored the factors making for social cohesion, and perhaps unwittingly helped to develop the concepts of social structure
and function. But there is one great difficulty involved in making a strong claim for them as founders of sociological argument.
They ruled out fundamental social change. That is, they assumed that only one type of society was possible – a hierarchical
one on the model of the
ancien régime. Any departure from that model was defined as degeneration or decay, rather than mere change; and the conservatives were
forever tempted to attribute such developments to conspiracy and/or heresy. Thus, instead of attempting to develop models
that would make it possible to understand the evolution of Western European society, their argument remained wholly normative.
Departure from their preferred model of society threatened to produce not another type of society but ‘non-society’ – that
is, anarchy and dissolution. That is the severe limitation on the conservatives’ contribution to the origins of sociological
argument.
Undoubtedly early nineteenth-century French liberals did learn from the writings of the conservatives. They learned, for example,
to take far more seriously the problem of social order and the role of common beliefs in creating social authority. They also
learned to take far more seriously the question of whether the atomization of society merely paves the way for the reign of
brute force – which was the conservatives’ reworking of the argument from classical political thought that democracy leads
first to anarchy and then to tyranny. But the liberals did
not adopt the
conservatives’ general strategy in argument. They did not define authority in such a way that it entails a hierarchical society;
they began to ask what
kind of authority would be compatible with greater social equality. By accepting the possibility of ‘democratic’ authority, they
ruled out a
simpliste distinction between authority and power – with the growth of naked power seen as the inevitable consequence of the rejection
of rightful (hierarchical) authority. Thus, it was the French liberals who did the really hard work of analysis, and who created
the first truly sociological idiom. For they rejected the wholly normative framework of the conservatives, and gradually defined
concepts, such as social stratification and elites, which could be used for comparative analysis. The liberals gradually defined
what seemed the major variables for the analysis of social change – the division of labour, the distribution of property,
education, mobility and the level of expectation. Thus, it was the French liberals who invented the concept of a social –
as distinct from a political – revolution. It is no accident that their greatest protégé, Alexis de Tocqueville, popularized
the concept of a ‘democratic revolution’ spreading through the West.
In sum, the Doctrinaires came to accept that social change was irreversible and in that sense ‘inevitable’. Any attempt to use positive law or the
state machine to undo the new division of labour and the increasing subdivision of property would be futile. Positive law
was too frail a weapon to counter the thrust of new social habits, customs and expectations. How did the Doctrinaires come to these conclusions? Here some knowledge of French political history from 1815 to 1830 is indispensable. In the 1820s
what might be called the ‘Great Debate’ took place in Paris – a debate which dominated the Chamber of Deputies, the press
and pamphleteering. That debate was sparked off by the end of the period of relatively liberal Doctrinaire government (1815–20), after the assassination of the heir to the throne, the duc de Berri, in 1820. Doctrinaire government was succeeded by the ultra-royalist ministry of Villèle, which governed France – abetted by Charles X after 1824
– until the end of 1827.
The new ultra-royalist government of Villèle embarked on an ambitious programme of legislation and its proposals over the
next few years seemed to the
Doctrinaires to amount to an attempt to restore the
ancien régime in France. In rapid succession came bills to curtail press freedom, to restrict the suffrage, to restore primogeniture and
entail, to make sacrilege a crime punishable by death, and to indemnify the
noblesse for their losses during the Revolution. Now the
Doctrinaires – both those who remained in Parliament, such as Royer-Collard, and those who had been
dismissed from administrative posts, such as Barante and Guizot – set about showing that such proposals were incompatible
with the new state of society in France. It was in doing so that they applied the terms ‘aristocratic’ and ‘democratic’ not
merely to forms of government but to types of society. In their usage, an aristocratic society is defined by inequality of
basic rights and conditions – the castes of feudal society being an extreme form – while democratic society is marked by relative
equality of rights and conditions.
To combat the ultra-royalist legislative programme, the Doctrinaires found it necessary to point out the structural differences between ‘aristocratic’ society and ‘democratic’ society – to show
how the former had given way irremediably to the latter in France. Oddly, the ultra- royalists’ farouche proposals provided
just the points of comparison that were needed. For they drew attention to the respects in which modern society differed fundamentally from medieval society. Thus, the Doctrinaires were able to define the structure of democratic society by way of contrast with the model of society implied by the ultras’
proposals. They were able to show, in speeches and in writings, that the ultra model of society no longer corresponded to
anything in the real world. France, in other words, had undergone a profound social revolution. Wealth, power and education
had been redistributed to a crucial extent. From a caste society founded on inequality of rights and the concentration of
property, France had become a society founded on equality of fundamental rights – with the subdivision and circulation of
property and a more complex division of labour. The fixed social positions of an ‘aristocratic’ society had created a powerful,
self-confident elite resting on a permanently subordinated class. The dislodging of the individual from fixed positions in
a ‘democratic’ society (or atomization, as the Doctrinaires began to call it) releases individual ambition and raises expectations; it creates anxiety, competition and social mobility.
While the first type of society was associated with subsistence agriculture, the latter is associated with the growth of a
market economy.
Clearly, the
Doctrinaires offered a theory of social change rather than an account of social decay or degeneration as conservatives such as Maistre
and Bonald had done. Their use of models in order to identify types of society was primarily analytical and neutral. Only
after identifying the main features of each type did they discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the different types
of social organization. An excellent example of that is Guizot’s discussion of feudalism in his lectures on the
History of Civilisation in Europe (1828). Thus, while the
Doctrinaires by no
means did away with normative political theory – Guizot, for example, published works on the nature of representative government
– they did insist on a secure sociological basis for political theory. Ultra-royalist proposals to restore the
ancien régime seemed to them to illustrate the dangers of political theory which lacked such a basis. It became irrelevant and obscurantist.
The mistaken premise of writers like Nisbet ought now to be clear. The major breakthrough in sociological argument – the attempt
to found political argument on theories of social change – did not result from the debate generated by the French Revolution
soon after 1789. Rather, it resulted from the debate under the Restoration generated by ultra-royalist proposals to restore the ancien régime. Liberals taking part in that debate created a new mode of argument. They rejected a wholly normative approach to political
theory, developing models which made possible the analysis of social and economic change, and, a fortiori, the limits of political
choice. Theirs was the really hard work in forging categories for sociological argument. The greatest work of nineteenth-century
French liberal thought, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835–40), exemplified and rested upon that new mode of argument. What was the consequence for political theory of that change
in the mode of argument accomplished by the Doctrinaires and their protégé, Tocqueville? It was (a) a redefinition of the political problem, and (b) a more complex concept of liberty.
French liberals began to approach the problem of state power and authority in a very different way from their seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century English predecessors. They were no longer wrestling with the problem of political obligation in its
classical form. Nor were they seeking to define criteria which would permanently delimit the area of legitimate state action.
Confronted by a far more powerful state machine than any known to the English liberals, they sought to understand what had
contributed to the centralization of power (in particular, the role of class struggle), and what the obstacles to decentralization
in an atomized or democratic society might be. Thus, the Doctrinaires began to ask new questions. What changes in social structure were bound up with the emergence of the state? In what ways
did the structure of modern democratic society facilitate a concentration of power which might put both local self-government
and individual rights at risk? To what extent is decentralization compatible with political unity?
In order to explore these new questions, the
Doctrinaires fixed their attention on developments in Western Europe since the early Middle Ages. In examining changes in social structure,
they were struck by one thing especially – the rise of the bourgeoisie out of the original castes
of feudal society. In examining changes in political structure, they were equally struck by the way the growth of the state
paralleled the growth of this new intermediate social class. How, then, were the two related? In effect, the
Doctrinaires explored the relationship in two ways: conceptually and historically. Conceptually, they pointed out that the state (and
the correlated concept of sovereignty) is a necessary condition for a structure of equal fundamental rights. The idea of a
general political society, in which all are subject to a centralized agency acknowledged to have the right to make and enforce
rules of conduct binding on all, is part of what we mean by ‘social equality’. A permanently classified society, on the other
hand, does not entail such a centralized authority; for in it privileges and duties are defined into hereditary social roles.
Thus, making a distinction between the ‘individual’ and his social roles implies the role of the state, the concept of sovereignty.
Political centralization and social atomization are different aspects of the same process. The gradual collapse of the two
original feudal castes into a new intermediate social condition – in that sense the triumph of the bourgeoisie or social equality
– implies the growth of the state. But what kind of state? The second task undertaken by the
Doctrinaires was to show how the different forms of the modern state must be understood as consequences of different patterns of class
struggle. They identified two primary patterns – exemplified by the histories of England and France. The differences between
the two derived from the weakness of central government in France in the early feudal period, and its relative strength in
England after the Conquest. In France, the weakness of the crown vis-à-vis the feudal nobility led the crown to support the
claims of the new boroughs, and created a tacit alliance between the crown and the
tiers état directed against the power of the feudal nobility. The
tiers état acquiesced in the growth of royal power in order to destroy their local aristocratic oppressors. In England, on the other
hand, a different pattern of alliance grew up. The Norman Conquest had involved the creation of a relatively strong central
power. Faced by the threat of royal tyranny, the English aristocracy gradually formed an alliance with the new boroughs, and
eventually called representatives of the commons to Parliament. Thus, the English aristocracy joined the commons in limiting
the pretensions of the crown, and fought to establish common rights. The result was the creation of the English constitution
in which the rights of the crown were balanced by the rights of Parliament. In turn, the alliance between the aristocracy
and the middle classes in England meant that the original caste society was gradually transformed – the feudal aristocracy
based on birth and conquest fusing with a new aristocracy based on wealth. A more open social structure was the result.
Thus, different patterns of class conflict and alliance in the two countries had crucial political consequences. In France,
the alliance of the
tiers état and the crown against the
noblesse meant that government was centralized in the executive, whereas in England the alliance of the nobility and the commons led
to the centralization of government in the legislature. By the eighteenth century, then, the French monarchy claimed a monopoly
of political right, while in England Parliament claimed to be sovereign. That difference had important consequences for the
structure of government in the two countries. It meant that in England political centralization – the growth of the state
– was not accompanied by administrative centralization: the upper classes kept local affairs firmly in their own hands. In
France, on the other hand, local autonomy had been sacrificed by the bourgeoisie in order to destroy their feudal oppressors.
Thus, the French government had fallen completely into the hands of the king’s agents, hierarchically organized over the country
as a whole. In consequence, free mœurs (the habit of self- government and voluntary association) had died in France, while
in England free
mœurs were sustained by local autonomy. This historical argument was not the work of any one
Doctrinaire, it emerged gradually from 1815 to 1830 in the writings of Mme de Staël, Royer-Collard, Barante and Guizot. In Guizot’s lectures
at the Sorbonne in the late 1820s the argument took its definitive historical form – the form which so impressed the young
Alexis de Tocqueville, who attended Guizot’s lectures assiduously from 1828 until the July Revolution in 1830. Tocqueville
had the genius to see where the
Doctrinaires’ argument led, and how it might be applied to political theory. In
Democracy in America he generalized the
Doctrinaires’ analysis, basing his argument on the models of two types of society and drawing attention to the dangers which arise in
the transition from an ‘aristocratic’ society to a ‘democratic’ society. The disappearance of intermediate institutions –
of the hereditary corporations and great magnates of aristocratic society – threatens to leave society without autonomous
local institutions.
The people, at the moment when they begin to feel their power, finding that the nobles direct all local affairs, become discontented
with provincial government, less as provincial than as aristocratic.
7
They look to central government for support against their local oppressors. Thus, the struggle against social privilege proceeds
by strengthening
central government. As society is levelled or atomized, power and authority tend to go to the centre to be concentrated in
central government, which alone can claim to speak in the name of all.
This natural tendency of a democratic people to centralise the business of government … has its most rapid growth in an epoch
of struggle and transition, when the aristocratic and democratic principles are disputing with each other for ascendancy.
8
The changes are not merely political. Economic and social interdependence develop as the fixed, unequal positions of the older
society give way to greater equality of rights, which permits freedom of movement, exchange and an increasingly complex division
of labour. These changes create a new scale of social organization. They are made possible by the state, and, in turn, they
reinforce the role of the state. Thus, the state grows rapidly at the expense of traditional associations such as the manor,
commune and guild – and perhaps even the family.
What is the outcome? Whereas power and authority had been localized by the hierarchy of aristocratic society, the dislodging
of individuals from fixed social positions – growing equality or atomization – paves the way for centralization. A democratic
social structure offers no ‘natural’ obstacle to the growth of centralized bureaucratic power.
Tocqueville took over the image of an atomized society from the
Doctrinaires, and he made it perhaps the most powerful of all sociological images. That image seemed to him to conjure up the central
feature of democratic society – the change in the scale of social organization at the expense of local autonomy. That image
made it possible to identify remote bureaucratic power as the new enemy. As early as 1822 Royer-Collard had used the image
of
la société en poussière to point out the centralization which threatens a democratic society.
We have seen the old society perish, and with it that crowd of domestic institutions and independent magistracies which it
carried within it … true republics within the monarchy. These institutions did not, it is true, share sovereignty; but they
opposed to it everywhere limits which were defended obstinately. Not one of them has survived. The revolution has only left
individuals standing … It has dissolved even the (so to speak) physical association of the commune … This is a spectacle without
precedent! Before now one had seen only in philosophers’ books a nation so decomposed and reduced to its ultimate constituents.
From an atomized society has emerged centralization. There is no need to look elsewhere for its origin. Centralization has
not arrived with its head erect,
with the authority of a principle; rather, it has developed modestly, as a consequence, a necessity. Indeed, there where there
are only individuals, all business which is not theirs is necessarily public business, the business of the state. There where
there are no independent magistrates, there are only the agents of central power. That is how we have become an
administered people, under the hand of irresponsible civil servants, themselves centralized in the power of which they are agent.
9
Thus, it became a premise of the Doctrinaires that the growth of state power was intrinsically connected with the atomization of society, with the destruction of traditional
intermediate bodies.
To the Doctrinaires, the inadequacy of Montesquieu’s theory of the separation of powers suddenly seemed obvious. It rested on a hidden presupposition:
the survival of an aristocratic social structure. For what limited the concentration of power in Montesquieu’s theory? Montesquieu
assumed that the legislature, in whole or in part, would consist of representatives of a traditional superior class – which
would keep local affairs in its own hands (on the English model), and thus prevent the growth of a despotic central administration.
If the informal constraints on the growth of central power provided by an aristocratic social structure are removed, then
no formal limitation on its authority – and, consequently, on the growth of its power – exists. In a democratic or atomized
society, the separation of powers or functions in central government is not a sufficient safeguard against an excessive concentration
of power legitimated by the concept of state ‘sovereignty’. For when these agencies of central government act in concert,
then there are no independent centres of resistance left in society, no legal means of opposition.
In a democratic society, how could a degree of local autonomy be reconciled with the growth of the state? How could a balance
of power between the centre and periphery of society be established? That became
the politi cal problem as defined by the
Doctrinaires in the 1820s. Under their influence, Tocqueville learned to see the problem in that way. In 1828 he wrote:
There are two great drawbacks to avoid in organising a country. Either the whole strength of social organisation is centred
on one point, or it is spread over the country. Either alternative has its advantages and its drawbacks. If all is tied into
one bundle, and the bundle gets undone, everything falls apart and there is no nation left. Where power is dispersed, action
is clearly hindered, but there is strength everywhere.
10
Soon Tocqueville concluded that America, rather than England, offered a solution. England had avoided administrative centralization
because it remained to a crucial extent an aristocratic society. The United States provided the only successful example of
decentralization in a democratic or atomized society. Why? Federalism had prospered because there was no need to destroy an
aristocratic society there. Thus, American federalism seemed to offer a paradigm for the decentralization which ought to come
in Europe when the transitional struggles against social privilege had been won. Tocqueville turned American federalism into
an instructive myth, in order to demonstrate that local self-government is compatible with social equality and that those
who argued that community is possible only within a fixed social hierarchy were mistaken. American federalism provided Tocqueville
with the means of criticizing the unitary concept of the state and of sovereignty – by exploring different ways in which authority
and power could be devolved within a political system. With the help of the federalist example, he was able to argue that
the natural weakness of a democratic or atomized social structure – its tendency to centralize power and authority – could
be corrected by means of political reform.
That new concern with the devolution of power and authority – with countering the trend towards centralization – became the
badge of the French liberals. It shaped their discussions of the concept of liberty. Concerned with the changing structure
of society, they found the empiricist concept of liberty inadequate. In their view, that negative or physicalist concept of
liberty (defined as the absence of impediment or constraint) was not very helpful in a social context – that is, a context
of rule-governed action. It remained important as providing a final criterion for distinguishing between coerced and free
action. But, apart from that, it did not help much to clarify the different types of liberty that might be available in a
modern nation. It did not identify different forms of rule-governed action, or make any use of the distinction between les lois and les mœurs – between political and social structure – which they now regarded as one of the conquests of modern political thought. In
that way, the negative or physicalist concept of liberty failed to establish that intentions and motives, indeed action itself,
are only conceivable within a framework of social rules. For that reason it failed to distinguish between the ‘absence of
constraint’ and the ‘absence of obligation’.
The French liberals therefore tried to adapt the concept of liberty to a social or rule-governed context – relating different
versions of the concept to changes in social structure. Nearest to the negative concept, they
found, was the medieval notion of liberties as personal privileges – that is, a sense of liberty resting not on general rules,
but ultimately on the individual’s will; his ability to resist encroachment and enforce his commands. In that sense, the negative
concept of liberty, defined as the absence of impediment or constraint, might be shown to be more characteristic of hierarchical
societies, where ‘rights’ are understood as personal privileges, than of egalitarian societies, where ‘rights’ are by definition
general and imply duties to others. Thus, it could be argued that the notion of ‘equal civil liberty’ implies public duty
and a kind of self-discipline in a way that the aristocratic notion of liberty as privilege does not.
In a society where rights were thus seen as de facto personal possessions, a fierce sense of individual independence was generated
among the dominant class. That extreme sense of independence was necessarily weakened as social levelling and the emergence
of the state created a new notion of rights and rules as by definition general and protected by public power. The emergence
of political guarantees for rights and their generalization implies a notion of reciprocity which would have been unintelligible
in a caste society resting on the assumption of natural inequality.
Obviously, once rights are seen as rule-dependent and generally applicable, then the idea of ‘civil liberty’ becomes important
in identifying areas of free or uncoerced action defined and protected by law. But civil liberty does not exhaust the meaning
of liberty in the context of the modern state. The idea of ‘political liberty’ is necessary to identify the forms of participation
which might be available to individuals to influence the law- or rule-making process in a society. A society in which the
idea of rights was associated above all with personal will, with the ability to enforce commands and resist encroachments,
was unlikely to conceive of liberty as essentially involving the right and duty to take part in the formulation of rules which
would then bind all. Yet the individual will to resist, and in that sense negative liberty, may be weakened by a society in
which participation generates an alternative conception of liberty.
The ‘self-imposition of rules’ was the sense of liberty which Rousseau asserted in Du contrat social. But Rousseau had gone too far, in the view of the French liberals. Rousseau had removed participation from a context of
civil liberties (and the negative freedom which they protect) and identified it instead with ‘virtue’ – thus collapsing the
concept of liberty into that of morality. Benjamin Constant protested against Rousseau’s strategy by making his famous contrast
between ancient and modern liberty; the implication of his argument was that in modern society ‘participation’ would have
to be reconciled with respect for civil liberties.
To set up an ancient polis such as Sparta as a model was to ignore both the utterly different scale of modern society and
the moral revolution which had issued in changed ideas about the proper relationship between the individual and the group.
Thus, Constant and other French liberals insisted that emphasis on participation and civic duty should not jeopardize a sphere
of fundamental individual rights against the group or the state. Only by recognizing such rights was ‘virtue’ in a modern,
individualist sense promoted; to emphasize participation or political liberty on the ancient model to the exclusion of individual
freedom or choice was to hold up a concept of virtue which belonged to a totally different type of society – a society in
which virtue consisted in solidarity or submergence in the group. Thus, the French liberals were at pains to distinguish and
defend the roles of conscience and civil liberty on the one hand, and political rights and civic virtue on the other.
Not only that. True to their consistent concern with social structures, the French liberals applied the concept of liberty
to social structure and identified another sense of ‘liberty’ – a sense which in many ways they found the most interesting
and the most important to vindicate. That was the concept of ‘free mœurs’. Free mœurs were understood to be a set of attitudes and habits fostered in individuals when civil liberty and political liberty or participation
were joined together in a society, each reinforcing the other. The concept was used especially by Mme de Staël and Tocqueville.
By free mœurs they meant a sense of personal capacity, which promoted both self-reliance and the habit of free association, and thus moulded
all social relations. Free mœurs created an active citizenry attached to local freedom and joined together in numerous voluntary associations – the only real
safeguard against excessive centralization, which, in turn, destroys free mœurs.
Tocqueville used these different senses of ‘liberty’ to develop his argument in
Democracy in America. What was to be expected from the development of local freedom and flourishing voluntary associations? First of all, the
multiplication of political rights would result. Citizens would no longer be passive spectators of the operations of government
between periodic national elections. The right to influence the actions of government at all levels – local and regional as
well as national – would gradually develop a sense of the citizen’s duty to exercise such rights. Only in that way would representative
government become a full reality. Representative institutions at the centre were not enough. They would always be precarious
so long as they existed alone. Following the
Doctrinaires, Tocqueville insisted that anything like the French attempt to combine representative
institutions at the centre with a highly centralized administrative machine, an over-powerful executive, was fraught with
danger for liberty (in all its senses).
The second advantage expected from the development of local freedom was an enhanced sense of individual independence from
the state. That is, the exercise of political rights and participation in government would make people more aware of their
civil rights and increase their determination to defend them against both administrative abuse and legislative encroachment.
Indeed, participation (in a context of civil liberty) would be likely to lead to calls for new rights, for the extension of
civil liberty. Developing a clearer and firmer sense of the meaning of rights, citizens would be less pliable, less likely
to tolerate the infringement or contraction of civil liberties. Thus, Tocqueville did not believe that it was possible to
define a timeless criterion that would settle once and for all the legitimate sphere of individual action. Greater participation
in government would be a more effective motor of the growth of civil liberty.
The third and perhaps greatest advantage which Tocqueville and other French liberals expected to follow from the development
of local freedom and participation was a sense of personal capacity. That is what they meant by the development of free mœurs. As we have seen, the liberals’ concern with changes in social structure led them to apply the concept of liberty outside
the sphere of political institutions. They became impressed by the advantages which an alert and active citizenry carried
into all their social relations. That spirit could be satirized – and has been by later socialists – as the spirit of self-help,
of Samuel Smiles. But that is a crude, reductionist account of what the French liberals had in mind. Like Rousseau, they were
struck by the moralizing role of politics. They did not take human wants or preferences as given, on the English utilitarian model. Rather, they pointed to the connection between wants and intentions and the structure
of institutions. A despotic state administration, which subjected citizens to la tutelle on the French model, either undermines free mœurs (in a nation that has been free) or prevents them from developing. In such a society risk-taking and reliance on voluntary
associations decline in favour of place-seeking. The immunities and security which state employment offers become the object of ambitions. The attitudes of the civil service
become a kind of norm, and increasingly set the tone, even in the sphere of private or commercial activity.
Tocqueville and other French liberals were impressed by the spirit of enterprise which underlay the growth of the British
Empire and its prosperity. They traced it to free
mœurs – to the way the upper classes in
Britain had retained the management of their own affairs, and had not been pushed aside by a centralized state machine. Yet
Tocqueville saw that England, where social levelling had by no means reached the French condition, had yet to face the political
hazards associated with a democratic social revolution.
The new sociological mode of argument developed by the French liberals – their attempt to relate changes in social structure
to changes in political institutions and ideas – amounted to a stunningly original breakthrough. The chief result was that
these cautious liberals, almost despite themselves, became the first consistent champions of participation in modern political
thought. At times that honour has been claimed for Rousseau. But his argument for participation in Du contrat social rests on assumptions and definitions which radically undermined its effectiveness. By assuming that ‘real’ self-government
was possible only in a small community, Rousseau failed to develop an argument that could be applied to the reform of the
nation-state. And by eroding the distinction between liberty and morality, Rousseau blinded some later liberals to the advantage
of political participation. French liberals of the early nineteenth century avoided both these traps. They argued not so much
for limited government as for the maximum possible sharing out of political power – so that devolution would in effect impose
limits on the concentration of power and increase popular resistance to the infringement of civil liberties. Their interest
in social structure led them to apply the concept of liberty to mœurs – in free mœurs – but without threatening the distinction between voluntary and coerced action as Rousseau had done. Tocqueville’s didactic uses of the
spirit of the New England township illustrates that.
This new mode of argument did not develop in English liberalism. Nothing illustrates that better than a comparison of the
writings of Tocqueville and his contemporary, J. S. Mill. Mill was brought up in a liberal tradition based on the primacy
of the problem of knowledge (which led him to champion an inductivist programme), while the utilitarianism which provided
the foundation of his political theory was methodologically individualist and un-sociological. Thus, the liberalism of Mill’s
youth took little interest in tracing changing patterns of social and political organization. Mill was himself struck by the
difference on this point between French and English liberalism after he became acquainted with the Saint-Simonians and the
writings of Guizot and Tocqueville. He came to admire their work greatly (as his reviews reveal), but he did not feel able
to argue in the same fashion. Unable to argue in the new sociological mode, he was content to adopt some of the conclusions
without the
foundation of sociological argument that had given rise to them. Thus, in
On Liberty and
Representative Government we find Mill introducing themes from Tocqueville – the danger of centralization, threats to local liberty and variety, the
moralizing role of politics.
None of these ideas had anything to do with the utiltarianism of Mill’s youth. The utilitarian model for social policy was
– as Tocqueville liked to point out – a highly centralizing model. It laid emphasis exclusively on aggregation, on achieving
the most ‘rational’ or desirable balance of satisfactions. Efficiency and rationality were its criteria for judging policy
proposals. Utilitarianism, like classical economics, took wants as given. It was not interested in the ways in which different types of social organization shape individual wants. Thus, it placed no obvious value on participation as such. Mill imported the themes of self-development
and free mœurs from the more sociological tradition of French liberalism. He adapted them to the less historical mode of political argument
he had been brought up in. Thus, Mill proceeds by putting forward general principles and deducing their consequences. But
when he suddenly introduces threats to liberty such as uniformity or the tyranny of public opinion, the reader is rather puzzled.
These threats seem to refer to particular social conditions, perhaps even a theory of social change. But what theory? What
Mill has done is introduce some of the conclusions of the French liberals, without introducing their premises – the theory
of social change on which they founded their political arguments.
Mill acknowledged his debt to Tocqueville. But he adapted themes from
Democracy in
America to a mode of argument unaffected by the new sociological mode of argument. Mill’s way of arguing would not have been astonishing
to, say, Locke, whereas Tocqueville’s mode of argument might have seemed incomprehensible to him. By the early nineteenth
century in France, the possibility of fundamental social change, of a social revolution so profound that the inherited hierarchy
of European society was fragmented beyond recognition, had firmly established itself in the minds of French liberals. In England,
on the other hand, the triumph of gradualism left the old structure of society largely intact. The early development of England
beyond a caste society had long fascinated French liberals. But in the nineteenth century that very openness of English society
helped to restrict the sphere of English liberal thought – preventing it from developing a systematic interest in social change,
which became the badge of French liberalism. English liberals took the relatively open hierarchy of English society for granted.
In that sense, it seems fair to say
that much English liberal thought of the nineteenth and early twentieth century rested on a hidden sociological premise.
The contrast between Tocqueville and J. S. Mill is exceedingly instructive. Despite their friendship and influence on each
other, Mill and Tocqueville represent two poles of liberal thought – two traditions which had diverged significantly by the
mid nineteenth century.
It is no accident that French liberals introduced the problem of mass society – of atomization and centralization – into the
mainstream of modern political thought. By 1815 they were without illusions about the survival of an aristocratic society.
Perhaps because the changes in French society were more sudden and violent, French liberal thought has since the early nineteenth
century accepted that questions of political theory cannot be divorced from questions about social structure. The result has
been a more historical, less a priori mode of argument from Tocqueville to Raymond Aron, with less attention paid to fine
logical points and definitions, it is true, but with more concern to show how concepts are joined together in points of view
or ideologies, and how these in turn spring out of particular social conditions and help to transform them. ‘Change’ is thus
central to political theory for French liberals as for Marxists, and both offer a sharp contrast to the static model of argument
which goes far back in the history of English liberalism.