Capitalism as a Road to Serfdom? Tocqueville on Economic Liberty and Human Flourishing
STEVEN BILAKOVICS
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES
This essay is the seventh in a series from the book Economic Freedom and Human Flourishing: Perspectives from Political Philosophy, edited by AEI’s Michael R. Strain and Stan A. Veuger. Check back in every Tuesday for additional essays in the series.
Of Alexis de Tocqueville’s many deserved claims to renown, his penetrating, prescient critique of socialism surely ranks right at the top. The prospect of socialism is so troubling to Tocqueville for two main reasons. First, the promise of socialism is pitched at precisely the level to entice the peoples of democratic modernity. Given the desires, values, and self-image of the modern human being — the being who has lost faith in aristocracy and believes in the self-evidence of equality — the socialist utopia may prove too seductive to resist. Second, for Tocqueville socialism constitutes the primary threat to — the very antithesis of — human flourishing. The dispirited souls of socialism would be incapable of perceiving, much less acting on, the freedom, responsibility and dignity unique to the human condition.
So how does Tocqueville understand human flourishing? In his view, the good life — the fully human life, characterized by the excellences and happiness appropriate to the human being — is the life of liberty. Without getting too far lost in the labyrinth of meanings Tocqueville ascribes to liberty, we can sketch out two basic notions he develops: the first he views as proper to the common man of democratic times, and the second is characteristic of the superior element of any age. We can call these, respectively, the liberty of the good citizen and the liberty of the noble personality.
The liberty of the citizen is comprised in no small part of the formal rights of conscience, speech, association, and property. But for Tocqueville these civil liberties — the right to be left alone, in the silence of the laws, within a legal framework that secures property and persons — are at most half the picture. At least as important is political liberty — political participation and the use of one’s civil liberties in the exercise of political power — inscribed within a culture of robust political participation that reinforces the experience of real self-government. To enjoy the privacy rights — the “negative liberties” — of non-interference absent the opportunity, developed capacity, and habituated disposition for political association and action is to in effect suffer the experience of being free but powerless. For all of his newfound rights and liberties, the modern, apolitical individual can see and aspire only so far as to be “the king of his own castle.” This is why, beyond the public life of voluntary associations in civil society — whether bowling leagues or mass interest groups — the specifically political public life of participation in local self-government is paramount for Tocqueville. In modern times, what Tocqueville calls the “art of freedom” is the “art of association” — and of political association in particular. Everyday political associations constitute the infrastructure of the good society and the good life for the citizens of democracy. It is where the individual becomes a citizen — achieves the station of citizen — by moderating and elevating his view out of narrow, unfettered partiality and developing his capacity for practical judgment through collective deliberation over practical political issues. Through political association the citizen at once exercises power and learns prudence. Thus for Tocqueville, we can say that liberty is realized through political public activity, just as for Aristotle virtue is realized through the practice of politics.
Tocqueville’s second notion of liberty — that of the noble personality — subsumes but transcends the liberty of the good citizen. This liberty too implies a capacity for action, but one born of the virile force of one’s inner resources rather than through the cooperation of the many. It is an aristocratic rather than a democratic liberty. In democratic times it takes shape in the romantic heroism of the principled, spirited, and above all passionate few. Where the exercise of good citizenship is driven by what Tocqueville calls “self-interest well understood” — the enlightened recognition that one’s own good is always bound up with and contingent on the common good — this second notion of liberty follows upon immoderate self-transcendence and reckless self-sacrifice. Where Tocqueville found the liberty of the citizen in the energetic bustle and noise of American public life (at least in the North), he depicts the liberty of the noble soul as in full bloom in France, among the revolutionary “men of ‘89” — those who in a grand, sublime, tragic act of imagination attempted to remake the world in the name of the rights of man.
Socialism signifies the abolition of liberty in both of these iterations. In a famous debate before the Constituent Assembly in France on September 12, 1848, Tocqueville argued that “socialism stands for the community of property, the right to be provided with work, absolute equality, State control of all activities of individuals, despotic legislation, and the total submerging of each citizen’s personality in the group mind.” In a now-familiar argument that he pioneered, Tocqueville analyzes the advance of socialism in terms of the creep of “administrative centralization” — what Max Weber would later describe as the rationalization and bureaucratization of human life. Here, power concentrates in the organs of the state, and the state projects this power to plan, oversee, and regulate most every sphere of human activity. All the world is, in turn, represented as a system, a mechanical organization of complex but quantifiable materials and forces, which operates, if properly managed, predictably and efficiently according to design. Indeed, once we think and talk in terms of “systems” — “the economic system,” for instance — we are well down the road to centralization and managerial administration. Human culture is abstracted into a “society” of homogeneous, disconnected but interdependent individuals. Human action is channeled into a productive workforce. Human judgment becomes, in turns, a matter of professional or scientific expertise, utilitarian calculation, and unmoored speculation. And in the consequent empire of bureaucracy, individual initiative and the human spirit whither. A totalizing network of uniform rules and regulations enables the centralized administration of the demographied nation and simultaneously suffocates personal responsibility and self-government.
The prospect of socialism is all the more troubling, in Tocqueville’s eyes, because its promise is so tempting to modern democratic peoples. In the egalitarian mass of anonymous mediocrity, where the experience of individual insignificance — of being “lost in the crowd,” as Tocqueville often writes, of innumerable similar others — is all but inevitable, we the people abdicate our newfound sovereignty, forsake our rights and responsibilities, and invite our own superintendence. The individual comes to feel powerless, unable not only to make a difference in the world but moreover to influence or even understand the societal tides that buffet his own existence. Adrift and submerged, he casts off all things demanding or higher and turns his attention toward his own most immediate material needs and desires. The inhabitants of democratic society end up in the terrible position of being wholly self-centered without the resources for self-respect. In their “excessive humility,” as Tocqueville puts it, such a prostrate, infantilized people fall happily into the arms of the paternal (or better, maternal) state — the vast, impersonal power that relieves people of the burdens of thinking or acting for themselves and promises to take care of them. The outcome is the soul’s degradation and the spirit’s enervation. Along these lines, socialism strikes at the very roots of human pride and dignity, culminating in no less than a brave new world dystopia of humanity domesticated.
Tocqueville sketches this portrait of centralization, regulation, and servility most indelibly toward the end of Democracy in America, where he offers his vision of the rise of an “immense tutelary power” and its “mild despotism.” In a chapter entitled “What Kind of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear,” Tocqueville writes,
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 drawn into himself, is virtually a stranger to the fate of all the others. . . .
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 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. . . .
Equality paved the way for all these things by preparing men to put up with them and even 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. . . . 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.1
This extraordinarily rich passage is surely the most famous and often quoted in Tocqueville’s writings, and it has become the touchstone critique of Big Government, the “nanny” welfare state, and creeping socialism. F. A. Hayek, for instance, quotes this passage prominently and at length in The Road to Serfdom and notes that the title of his book is a reworded homage to Tocqueville’s phrase “the road to servitude.”
Against this image of centralization one might assume that Tocqueville would be the strongest of advocates for economic liberty and what would come to be called free-market capitalism. In a number of passages of Democracy in America Tocqueville does indeed celebrate the prudence, practicality, do-it-yourself attitude, and work-ethic virtues of the American businessman. He famously contrasts the vibrant energy of the free-labor North with the ethical lethargy of the slave-owning South. And he marvels at the reckless passions and chance-taking initiative of the American entrepreneur, who seems to love the gamble more than the gain. There is a sort of honor and even heroism to be found in the American trader, Tocqueville writes, who risks his life on the wild frontier or the open ocean in his incalculable passion to make a few pennies more than his competitor. The American applies the maxims of war
to business, and he finds great pride in his commercial ventures and conquests.
But for Tocqueville this is only part of the picture of the rising bourgeois way of life. As with most multidimensional phenomena — above all the rise of democratic modernity itself — Tocqueville is deeply ambivalent about the new socio-economy. There is an underside to every appearance, and an underside to the underside. Even as he admires the business-minded American, he expresses nothing but contempt in his private correspondence for “the little bourgeois pot of soup” of his native French politics and society — the shameless, spineless class that serially courted Napoleonic despotism. He writes in Democracy of his concern that industrialization may give rise to a new, cruel, and exploitative faux-aristocracy comprised of the owners of the means of production, alongside a debased, stultified, cog-in-the-assembly-line working class. Ultimately, he worries that the bourgeois ethos of commercial society may exacerbate the worst pathologies of democratic modernity — its vulgar materialism and dissociative individualism — thereby paving the way for administrative centralization, socialism, and mild despotism. Capitalism itself may be a road to serfdom.
In this context, let’s look at four elements of economic liberty: private property rights, freedom of contract, free enterprise, and the free market. In Tocqueville’s view, property rights are an essential component of liberty and check upon government expansion. Property ownership — and landownership in particular — serve to decentralize power and buttress the independence and sense of self-worth of the individual, introducing a semblance of the aristocratic disposition into democratic times. Moreover, private property and the sense that one has something to lose generate a conservative ethic that counterbalances the revolutionary flights of innovation to which democratic peoples are prone.
At the same time, widespread property ownership and the preoccupation with material wealth may make a people excessively conservative, even to the point of illiberality. Afraid to lose what they have, people may come to value the stability of the established order above all. The security of the self and its possessions may become paramount. Such peoples would fear anarchy more than tyranny, and popular unrest more than authoritarianism. They would be peaceful and tranquil, orderly and mild, like a flock of timid and industrious animals. Further, the passion for acquisition may give way to an imbecilic need for material well-being — for comfort and pleasure in addition to security — and an idiotic privatism that saps the civic and manly virtues and blinds citizens to the very preconditions of their well-being. Consumed by the desires of the body, the individual comes to neglect the public good and the goods of the soul. Ambition becomes constant and pressing but petty, happiness translates to pleasure, and flourishing reduces to success at getting whatever one desires. When “commercial mores” come to reign, constant superficial flux and motion will mask a deep, dispirited inertia, and great revolutions (first political, then intellectual) will become rare in a sort of stagnant, bourgeois end of history.
“When I see . . . love of property [become] so restless and ardent” and “citizens continue to confine themselves ever more narrowly within the sphere of petty domestic interests, . . . becoming all but invulnerable to those great and powerful public emotions that roil nations but also develop and renew them,” Tocqueville writes, “I tremble, I confess, that they might eventually allow themselves to become so entranced by a contemptible love of present pleasures that their interest in their own future and the future of their offspring might disappear.”
Tocqueville continues:
I am afraid [the new societies] will end up all too invariably attached to the same institutions, the same prejudices, and the same mores, so that the human race will stop progressing and narrow its horizons. I fear that . . . man will exhaust his energies in petty, solitary, and sterile changes, and that humanity, though constantly on the move, will cease to advance.”2
As with property rights, freedom of contract is, in Tocqueville’s view, a valuable check on government centralization and expansion. Moreover, it imbues the relationships between individuals with a sense of formal dignity and mutual respect. But the notion of the contracting individual as an autonomous chooser of his own goods and ends — his own way of life — may also inflame the obsessive, self-subverting pursuit of independence that Tocqueville calls individualism. Where self-interest well understood leads citizens to understand that, particularly in democratic times, they can only do well together, individualism is the erroneous judgment that I can stand alone — indeed that I must, in the name of freedom, sever myself from the influence, aid, and support of others. To be free, I must be self-sufficient and provide — financially, but also intellectually and spiritually — for myself. The aspiration to, and even routine expectation of, such radical independence leads ultimately to intellectual disorientation and spiritual exhaustion, and so to ever deeper and more ashamed forms of dependence. Citizens increasingly come to need the support from others that they ethically cannot accept. And so they seek out impersonal sources of patronage, dependence upon which will degrade to a lesser degree their egalitarian principles and self-conception.
The mistake here is again one of excess: that human beings can be, beyond self-governing, actually self-sufficient — the sovereign individual of liberal contract theory and the self-made man of capitalist fantasy. Tocqueville never pays much attention to social contract theory and its foundational image of atomistic individuals in a state of nature. The prepolitical, presocial, free-standing individual is, for Tocqueville, largely unimaginable and irrelevant to questions of human nature, justice, and rule. His political sociology refers rather to history. It is oriented by reflection upon the cultures and constitutions — the regime forms — from which the human being develops its particular intellectual and ethical character. His analysis of freedom and authority in human association focuses not on voluntary consent but rather on the mores — the sociocultural prejudices — that frame a people’s goods and ends. His concern is not the formal legitimacy of contract theory, but rather the frameworks of authority — both secular and transcendent — that orient and elevate judgment. For Tocqueville, a free society coheres less around voluntarism — a preoccupation with which leads to an exclusive adoration of the human will — than around the ingrained habit of voluntarism.
Indeed, many of the forms of association Tocqueville most fully affirms — such as juries and townships — are not immediately constituted via contractual agreement or voluntary membership. Rather, citizens are in a sense drafted and put into a company of those among whom there is no particular shared interest. Unlike voluntary associations — professional associations, interest groups, and so on — such institutions educate citizens by compelling them to consider the good from a less partial, common, and public perspective.
As we have seen, Tocqueville celebrates the free-enterprise economic (and political) activity characteristic of the American North. Here too, though, the danger arises that economic vibrancy and socioeconomic mobility may themselves worsen the individualism and materialism of modern democratic societies. The constant hope of rising and fear of falling breeds an agitated restiveness in the American way of life. Americans pursue ever more even as they are unsure of their own purposes. Appetite becomes insatiable, and desire endless. Progress comes to be defined in exclusively secular, materialistic terms, which in turn produces a sort of moral nearsightedness and ethical anxiety. The body’s mortality rather than the soul’s salvation comes to define human time, turning existence into a feverish rush to nowhere. The spirit of competition undermines the habits of cooperation and association upon which a healthy democratic society depends. Money, as the sole remaining medium of power, influence, and efficacy for the vast majority of people, becomes of far more than pecuniary importance. And the rewards of economic life draw people away from politics and civic life. “It is not necessary,” Tocqueville writes, “to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy, they themselves willingly loosen their hold. The discharge of political duties appears to them to be a troublesome impediment which diverts them from their occupation and business.”3
To speak of “the free market” in the context of Tocqueville’s thought is a bit anachronistic, but he clearly rejects the centralized administration and regulation of any sphere of society, including that of economic activity. But he just as clearly questions the sort of Scottish Enlightenment vision of a self-regulating — spontaneous as opposed to planned — society that coheres primarily around the motive of self-interest, the division of labor, and free trade.
First, the free play of self-interest in commercial society would likely yield the lowest-common-denominator pursuit of material well-being. In the free market, the vulgar always costs less and sells more than things of virtue. Left to the guidance of the invisible hand, modern nations would move spontaneously toward consumerism, privatism, and mass-market uniformity. Thus is Democracy in America addressed precisely to the planners of society — not its bureaucrats but its statesmen and educators.
Second, the very idea of “the market” — wherein impersonal forces and immutable laws operate within an incomprehensibly complex and self-regulating system that provides for our wants and meets our needs — may well contribute to the sense of fatalism Tocqueville so fears. Above all, Tocqueville despises the degrading resignation born of a belief in determinism — whether rooted in the vast, overawing abstractions of history, genetic nature, society, or the bureaucratic state. If individuals come to view the market as natural or even sacrosanct, or to live in silent awe of market forces as one might before the forces of nature, the free market will end up as one more aspect of modern life that seems to steer the individual’s fate beyond his understanding and without his say.
Third, while Tocqueville believes that human beings do have a natural desire and capacity for freedom, he argues that modern democratic peoples are prone to misunderstand political liberty’s cultural and ethical preconditions — the habits of heart and mind that dispose citizens to embrace civic and political association along with the burdens of collective self-government. And they are prone to miscalculate freedom’s necessary and proper limits in the pursuit of radical independence. In their egalitarian hostility to every semblance of external authority, democratic peoples develop an aversion to the very concepts of judgment, virtue, and education — all those concepts that take shape around hierarchies of higher and lower, superior and inferior, noble and base. “Freedom” thus becomes synonymous with choice (the liberty of conscience, for instance, reduces to the right to choose one’s religion), but absent all frameworks of authority that orient and elevate one’s choices and make something worth choosing, the result is choice without reason or judgment — simply the subjective expression of will.
Freedom, in turn, is taken to either licentious or transcendent excesses — freedom as debauchery or autonomy. The sole remaining ethical points of reference lie at the immoderate extremes of human potentiality — sovereign self-rule or the instant gratification of the desire for material well-being. The human being comes to imagine himself as paradoxically at once more and less than a political animal. Recall Aristotle’s reasoning that “the man who is isolated, who is unable to share in the benefits of political association, or has no need to share because he is already self-sufficient, in no part of the city, and must therefore be either a beast or a god.”4 In his newfound freedom, democratic man considers himself both beast and god.
Tocqueville concludes that the realization of the freedom promised by the rise of democracy cannot be spontaneous, the product of a laissez-faire absence or the silence of the laws. Freedom becomes an art — not something natural but rather to be learned and practiced — precisely because political association has become an art. At bottom Tocqueville is closer to Aristotle than Adam Smith in his view of liberty and human flourishing, looking less to the invisible hand of free-market society than to the deliberative practices of political society.
Ultimately, Tocqueville remains too much of a small “r” republican to wholeheartedly embrace the economic liberty of commercial society. He is too aware of the corrupting influence of luxury, the corrosive effects of privatism, and so on. Hayek, and following him Milton Friedman, argue that political liberty cannot be preserved in the absence of economic liberty. Tocqueville would agree. But for Tocqueville our situation is never so simple, and there is always an underside to the values by which we live. Economic liberty is essential to political freedom, but also a threat to political liberty. For Tocqueville, sustaining the culture of political participation, and therefore of political liberty, is paramount. Political liberty (along with the authority of religion) provides something of a remedy to the pathologies of the modern democratic way of life — its individualism and materialism, its logical and psychological corollaries that subvert every source of noble pride and dignity, the dispiriting experience of being free but powerless. Insofar as economic liberty reinforces political liberty and the mores of self-government, it is of great value. Insofar as the elements of commercial society and free-market capitalism are affirmed to immoderate extremes — and particularly insofar as they produce the depoliticization of self and society — they should be criticized and checked.
Ayn Rand famously claimed that she was for the separation of economics and state for the same reasons that most are for the separation of church and state. For Tocqueville, the more significant remedy to Big Government centralization and the urge to welfare maternalism — and the real recipe for the good life and the good society in democratic times — is less the separation of economics and state than the separation of politics and state. The key to human flouring is less economic liberty than political liberty, and its venue less the unfettered free market than a culture of vital political association and activity.
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1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Library of America, 2004), vol. 2, part 4, chap. 6.
2. Ibid., 2.3.21
3. Ibid.
4. Aristotle, Politics, 1.1253a25.
