Demos Assembled
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Demos Assembled

Democracy and the International Origins of the Modern State, 1840–1880

Stephen W. Sawyer

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eBook - ePub

Demos Assembled

Democracy and the International Origins of the Modern State, 1840–1880

Stephen W. Sawyer

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An intelligent, engaging, and in-depth reading of the nature of the state and the establishment of the modern political order in the mid-nineteenth century. Previous studies have covered in great detail how the modern state slowly emerged from the early Renaissance through the seventeenth century, but we know relatively little about the next great act: the birth and transformation of the modern democratic state. And in an era where our democratic institutions are rife with conflict, it's more important now than ever to understand how our institutions came into being.Stephen W. Sawyer's Demos Assembled provides us with a fresh, transatlantic understanding of that political order's genesis. While the French influence on American political development is well understood, Sawyer sheds new light on the subsequent reciprocal influence that American thinkers and politicians had on the establishment of post-revolutionary regimes in France. He argues that the emergence of the stable Third Republic (1870–1940), which is typically said to have been driven by idiosyncratic internal factors, was in fact a deeply transnational, dynamic phenomenon. Sawyer's findings reach beyond their historical moment, speaking broadly to conceptions of state formation: how contingent claims to authority, whether grounded in violence or appeals to reason and common cause, take form as stateness.

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Year
2018
ISBN
9780226544632

1

Inequality:

Alexis de Tocqueville and the Democratic Foundations of a Modern Administrative Power

Throughout Europe . . . we will witness the birth of something that resembles our administrative law; for this law is no less than one of the new forms of the State in the world. . . . It is the modern system.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, Rapport sur Macarel1
Perhaps no one in Europe or the Americas did more to push the democratic question to the center of politics during this period than Alexis de Tocqueville. John Stuart Mill captured his significance when he unabashedly stated that Tocqueville’s Democracy in America was “the first philosophical book ever written on Democracy, as it manifests itself in modern society.”2 More than a century and a half later at the outset of the twenty-first century, political philosopher Sheldon Wolin opened his vast exploration of Tocqueville’s work stating that “Democracy in America represents the moment when democracy first came into focus as the central subject of a political theory.” Precocious and genuinely international in its focus, Tocqueville’s work convinced many that democracy was the inevitable path of political modernity. The political thought and practice of the decades that followed the publication of this work shared in the attempt to work through the implications and contradictions inherent in the democratic problem as presented by Tocqueville.3 Thus, any attempt to place democracy at the center of an international political history of the state in the second half of the nineteenth century starts there.
Tocqueville’s prominence for thinking the democratic reached new heights in the second half of the twentieth century. Since his postwar rediscovery, his history and theory of democracy as a “social condition” has provided the foundations for one of the most long-standing and powerful liberal critiques of modern democratic life. In particular, Tocqueville’s account of the inevitable push toward a democratic “equality of condition” within political modernity, we have learned, rendered state administrative institutions a constant danger. From his celebration of an American weak state and vibrant civil society in his Democracy in America to his critique of an overbearing French statism in the Old Regime and the French Revolution, Tocqueville’s account prophetically warned of the perils of a centralized administration in the modern world. He understood, we are told, that isolated individuals were produced by—and proportionately ill-equipped to resist—the omnipresent threat of a modern bureaucratic despotism designed to look after their every need. For Tocqueville, the democratic equality necessary for distant administrative institutions to govern threatened liberty, which therefore could only be ensured by vibrant civic associations opposed to the state. To be preserved in this age of mounting equality, the story thus concludes, liberty required a relentless critique of administrative power.
There is no doubt that this interpretation captures an essential, perhaps even one of the essential, lines of reasoning in Tocqueville’s thought. Tocqueville did negotiate the tension between liberty and equality through a critique of state power. He did posit equality as a social condition. And he did think that liberty required an uncompromising recognition of the dangers of a centralized administration for modern liberty. Our awareness of these central strands of Tocqueville’s thought reach far back into the politics of Tocqueville’s rediscovery in the twentieth century, especially in the context of antitotalitarianism, the threat of communist socialism and liberal critiques of the welfare state.4 Raymond Aron laid the cornerstone of Tocqueville’s rediscovery when he explained “Tocqueville means by the term democracy, a social state and not a form of government.”5 Following in this tradition, François Furet similarly noted that this emphasis on democracy as a social form blinded him to the positive potential of the state: “He [Tocqueville] accumulated the political inconveniences of statification [étatisation], without yet presenting any of its practical advantages.”6 And Wolin’s commanding intellectual biography states straightforwardly that for Tocqueville “the democratic state is a contradiction in terms.”7 Indeed, it is precisely as a liberal critic of democratic society—as opposed to a theorist or historian of democracy as a form of state—that Tocqueville’s work has been so generative for more than a half century.8
And yet, there are some deep historical difficulties with such a reading of Tocqueville.
For one thing, it has entirely evacuated a positive conception of administrative power found throughout Tocqueville’s work.9 Of course, like his liberal contemporaries and predecessors, Tocqueville shared a suspicion of the absolutist and terrorist state. And yet, the state sat at the center of his preoccupations. As we know, on a personal level, Tocqueville spent the better part of the July Monarchy and the Second Republic in the state’s service, not to mention his off-and-on lifetime engagement with local government in Normandy. Tocqueville only turned his back on public service at the same time that many of his colleagues, like Thiers or Louis Blanc, did, as Louis-Napoleon consolidated power. Tocqueville spent the central years of his life as a “statesman.” This alone might raise doubts about a profound antistatism in his work.
Beyond the personal, however, such an approach imposes a relatively limited conception of the state—largely borrowed from twentieth-century European social theory and sociology—back onto Tocqueville.10 Of course Tocqueville conceived of the modern state as a bureaucratic hegemon invented by absolutism and then realized through the despotic tendency within postrevolutionary French political culture. However, alongside this institutional account, Tocqueville also told a history of different ways of deploying power, a diversity of technologies and objects around and through which regulatory capacities and administration were constituted. For Tocqueville, administrative power was not a thing nor some singular mechanism that operated in the same way in all times and all places. It did not have normative or monopolistic properties which lorded over all societies across time and space. Rather, administrative power contracted, expanded, structured, invented, and interacted with a variety of other governmental and social practices over the longue durée. In short, the state was a historical process.
There are, of course, some readings of Tocqueville that have signaled beyond a liberal critique of democracy and toward a history of the democratic state in his work. Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, Henry Michel’s towering history of The Idea of the State in France placed Tocqueville squarely within the “Democratic School.” Michel offered Tocqueville a privileged position within his history of the democratic state explaining that in opposition to the individualism inherited from eighteenth-century liberalism, Tocqueville provided a theory of “power that was designed precisely to give birth and maintain the solidarity between citizens.”11 A few decades later in the interwar period, Guido de Ruggiero also placed Tocqueville in the democratic camp, arguing that he had been an essential force in democratizing early nineteenth-century liberalism: “Tocqueville dispelled a nightmare by showing that the democratic idea, far from being a revolutionary aberration, stood upon the highway of French history.”12 Ruggiero concluded insisting that in Tocqueville’s work “liberalism and the new form of democracy come to coincide in their formal conception of the State.”13
What follows brings this line of thought under new light to understand how Tocqueville’s work contributes to a history of the democratic state. The approach shifts from the overwhelming emphasis in Tocqueville’s thought on the tendency toward democratic equality to an investigation of his perspective on the problem of inequality in democracy. Instead of the dominant harmonic line of equality, an investigation of the counterpoint of inequality reveals a profoundly revised vision of the relationship between democracy and the administrative state. In sum, while Tocqueville certainly elaborated a complex and devastating critique of certain modes of centralized administrative power in democracy, when his work is examined through the lens of inequality what appears is a consistent critique and recognition of the importance of administrative power and law in modern democratic regimes. In other words, Tocqueville cultivated an ambivalence toward public administration that at once recognized its potential dangers while maintaining the imperative of governing in a modern democratic regime.
What follows then does not so much seek to deny Tocqueville’s usefulness as a critic of modern administration as to recover another central stream in his work which highlights his positive conception of administrative power. Indeed, across his oeuvre Tocqueville posed the question of how to cultivate an administration and public law that provided public services in the interest of the citizens within a democracy. From Democracy in America through Old Regime and the French Revolution, and especially in his lesser-known texts on administrative law, he widely recognized that public administration was necessary in modern democracy. Tocqueville therefore did elaborate a positive theory of the state that went beyond prophetic foreboding: one that could develop the infrastructural power and mechanisms necessary for the provision of services and goods in the public interest. He theorized a state in society: a state that did not so much dominate society as emanate from it. In so doing, he established a foundation upon which an entire generation of democratic thinkers would begin to reconsider the state.

The Problem of Democratic Inequality

For all of Tocqueville’s exploration of the problem of democratic equality, he also showed a profound interest in new forms of economic and social inequality within modern democracy and industrial capitalism. Analyses of the problem of inequality can be found in many of Tocqueville’s texts, large and small, as well as suggestions that this topic was of central importance to him and his conception of democracy. Reflecting upon his chapter on democracy’s impact on salaries in Democracy in America, he revealed that “this chapter has the inconvenience of presenting on the most important questions of our time.”14 Later, noting the absolute centrality of inequality in one of his most important texts on the question, Memorandum on Pauperism, he explained: “‘I confess to you in all frankness that . . . this small piece of writing . . . touches on one of the most important questions in the modern world or even the most important.’”15
While Tocqueville remained convinced of the structural tendency toward equality as a social condition within modern democratic society, he was also convinced that, if left unchecked, modern capitalism in a democratic society would generate what he called “a new aristocracy.” In Memorandum on Pauperism, written following his visit to England in the 1830s, Tocqueville clearly admitted that “industry has preserved a form of aristocracy in modern nations, just as all the institutions and mores to which aristocracy gave birth are disappearing.”16 Tocqueville’s political economy was in effect pulled in two directions at once—toward an equality of condition on the one hand and a new form of modern inequality on the other.17 Or as he stated in his discussion of the industrial proletariat in Volume II of his Democracy in America: “This state of dependence and misery in which one finds a portion of the industrial population is in fact exceptional and contrary to all that surrounds it.”18 This tension between a generalized tendency toward equality and the rise of sharper modes of inequality led him to investigate what may be titled the problem of democratic inequality.
In his discussion of salaries in the United States, Tocqueville insisted that rise in salary pay would continue the general trend toward equality in democracy: “As conditions become increasingly equal, salaries rise and as salaries rise, conditions become more equal.” On the other hand, he pointed out, when observed from the perspective of inequality, “today a great and unfortunate exception can be seen.” Recognizing the obvious asymmetry between owners and workers in industrial capitalism, Tocqueville noted, “The number of those who become entrepreneurs is very small. Being rare, they can easily join together and fix the wage that they like. . . . If they refuse work out of a common agreement: the master, who is wealthy, can easily wait without going into ruin until necessity forces them to return.” As a result, the very structural tendencies that encouraged social equality simultaneously produced the possibility of meaner and more sinister forms of inequality.
While there had always been inequalities, the situation of the new industrial proletariat was very different from the poor farmers of the past, Tocqueville argued: “There is this great distinction between the rural and industrial proletariat, which is that the latter, independent of the usual miseries that may be brought on by a lack of foresight may also be endlessly exposed to the accidental woes that could not be anticipated and that do not threaten the former. And his chances are infinitely greater in industry as such than in agriculture because industry, as we shall see, is subject to crises that agriculture does not face. These unanticipated woes are born of commercial crises.”19 So there were both structural and contingent reasons for the rise of inequalities in modern democratic society. The problem was compounded, moreover, by the fact that intervention by a centralized administrative state was poorly placed to overcome the new kinds of inequality that emerged within it.
Indeed, according to Tocqueville, an administrative revolution, which had introduced a new technology of government since the seventeenth century was more suited to isolating individuals than actually helping them. In his sketch for Chapter XI in Old Regime and the French Revolution, “The Growing Inequality in Institutions and Mores Even While They Decline in Fact,”20 Tocqueville clearly stated the paradoxical nature of modern inequality. “This idea seems paradoxical at first,” he remarked. “If we go back multiple centuries . . . one finds what we called inequality to be far greater.” But, he continued, “we see that the isolation of distinct classes that characterized the eighteenth century, did not yet exist.” “In a word,” Tocqueville continued, “while inequality existed, isolation did not.”21 It was the modern administrative state that was responsible for this new condition: it had at once generated a growing equality of condition and new levels of isolation, which made the forms of inequality of the modern era more difficult to manage and accept.
For Tocqueville, then, centralized state power was less a potential solution than a danger in such a context. Speaking of the role of tax collection in the attempt to reduce inequality, Tocqueville argued, “Taxes ceased to be shared in common and were focused exclusively at first and then principally on the person and the property of the roturiers, and while this inequality was ultimately smaller than it would be when the common taxes were later created by Louis XIV for the two classes, it still generated an indissoluble barrier, creating more marked and perceived differences between the two classes, and a more thorough isolation than had ever previously existed.”22 Instead of reducing inequality, Tocqueville argued, taxes had in fact exacerbated inequalities by reinforcing social barriers and isolation through increased dependence on administrative authority.23 Similarly, the degradation of the condition of the French peasants and the greater inequality that befell them, for example, had only been increased by the reform of the corvée into a local tax. Tocqueville discusses the startling information, uncovered in the intendants’ correspondence, that it became widely accepted that the roads would be paid for by the poorest, who used them the least.24 From a historical perspective, the administrative state of the old regime had been at best ineffective and at worst responsible for generating the conditions for an irremediable inequality that marked the modern condition.
Hardly a linear process, the absolutist administrative state had generated the new social and political structures that simultaneously ensured a rise in equality of condition while also creating the possibilities for a new, more insidious form of inequality. In the realm of the administrative state, this paradox raised the problem of how to solve modern social and political problems like inequality democratically without reinforcing the state’s nefarious tendencies to isolate and disempower individuals. The administrative state was ineffective, because it was responsible for cultivating individual and class isolation. Any remedy, in effect, ostensibly worsened the disease. The problem of democratic inequality then could be stated in the followi...

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