Commentary: Old Europe's New Despotism

Samuel Gregg, writing on the Acton Institute's website, notes:

2005 marks the bicentenary of the birth of one of 19th century Europe’s most insightful political thinkers. Less well-known than Marx, Alexis de Tocqueville may have the last laugh when it comes to predicting accurately the course of history. This is especially true when it comes to understanding some of “Old” Europe’s current economic and political malaises.

[snip]

In Democracy in America, Tocqueville suggested that democracy was capable of breeding its own form of despotism, albeit one without the edges of Jacobin or Bonapartist dictatorship with which Europeans were all too familiar. The book spoke of “an immense protective power” which took all responsibility for everyone’s happiness-just so long as this power remained “sole agent and judge of it.” This power, Tocqueville wrote, would “resemble parental authority” but would try to keep people “in perpetual childhood” by relieving people “from all the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living.”

Such circumstances might arise, Tocqueville noted, if democracy’s progress was accompanied by demands for a leveling of social conditions. The danger was that an obsession with equality was very compatible with increasingly centralized state-power. Leveling social conditions, Tocqueville observed, usually involved using the state to subvert those intermediate associations that reflected social differences, but also limited government-power.