Alexis de Tocqueville · Politics
Tocqueville’s darkest and most prophetic warning: that democratic equality breeds a new kind of solitude he named <em>individualism</em>, and that from it can grow a new kind of tyranny - mild, benevolent, and total - in which a vast tutelary state reduces free citizens to a flock of contented, passive children.
Tocqueville coined, or gave new and precise meaning to, a word we now use constantly: individualism. And he was careful to distinguish it from something it resembles but is not - ordinary selfishness or egoism. The distinction is essential to his whole analysis, and we have largely lost it. Selfishness, he said, is a vice as old as humanity: the passionate, exaggerated love of oneself that leads a person to prefer himself to everything and everyone, to grab and dominate. Selfishness is a fault of the heart, a moral failing found in every age and society.
Individualism is something different and distinctively modern - a product not of vice but of the democratic, equal condition itself. It is not a passionate love of self but a calm, considered withdrawal: a disposition that leads each citizen to cut himself off from the larger mass of his fellows and retreat into a small circle of family and friends, leaving the wider society to look after itself. The individualist is not necessarily grasping or cruel; he may be a perfectly decent, mild, well-meaning person. He simply withdraws - turns inward to his private life, his home, his immediate circle, his own affairs, and ceases to concern himself with public matters or the fate of the larger community. He does not hate his fellow citizens; he merely loses interest in them, and in the common life they share. Selfishness, Tocqueville observed, springs from a depraved heart and blights all the virtues; individualism springs at first only from misguided judgment and faulty understanding, and at first attacks only the public virtues - but in the long run, he warned, it attacks and destroys all the others too, and ends in pure selfishness. Individualism is the gentle beginning whose terminus is the very vice it seemed so harmless beside.
Why should equality breed this withdrawal? Tocqueville’s explanation is among his most penetrating. In an aristocratic society, he observed, every individual was bound into a vast chain of connection. Each person had a fixed place in the hierarchy, tied permanently to those above and below - the noble to his ancestors and descendants, to his dependents and his lord; the peasant to his master, his village, his inherited station. These bonds were often oppressive, but they were bonds: they connected each person to others, gave each a recognised place in a larger whole, and made each acutely aware that his fate was tied to others’ - that he was a link in a chain stretching from the distant past into the far future, embedded in a web of mutual obligation and dependence.
Equality dissolves these chains, and in dissolving them, isolates. When ranks are levelled and the bonds of dependence broken, each individual is set loose - independent, self-sufficient, owing nothing to those above and expecting nothing from those below, because there are no longer those above and below. This is a liberation, and Tocqueville honours it as such. But it has a shadow. The democratic individual, freed from the chain, finds himself standing alone. He owes little to anyone and feels little owed to him; he is connected to no fixed station, no inherited community, no chain of generations. The link to ancestors and descendants weakens (for in a mobile, equal society, where each makes his own fortune, the past and future matter less); the link to social superiors and inferiors vanishes (for there are none); and the individual is thrown back on himself, on the small circle of his own choosing - his immediate family and friends - and inclined to forget the rest. Equality, by making each person independent of every other, paradoxically isolates each person from all the others. It breaks the bonds of dependence, which were also the bonds of connection; and a society of equals, unless it deliberately creates new horizontal bonds to replace the old vertical ones, tends to dissolve into a multitude of disconnected individuals, each absorbed in his own small world. This is the deep source of individualism: not a moral failing, but the natural social consequence of the equal condition, which severs the connections that once, for all their injustice, bound human beings together.
In one of the most famous and prophetic passages ever written about democracy, Tocqueville described in detail the new despotism he feared - and the description is so precise, so unlike anything that had existed in his time, that it reads as a vision of possibilities that would only fully emerge in the centuries after him. He admitted that he was trying to describe something for which no existing word was adequate; the old words - tyranny, despotism - carried the wrong associations of violence and cruelty, and what he foresaw was gentle.
Over a society of equal, isolated individuals, each absorbed in the petty pleasures of private life, there would rise, he wrote, an immense and tutelary power - “tutelary” meaning that of a guardian over a ward, a parent over a child. This power would take sole charge of securing the people’s gratifications and watching over their fate. It would be absolute in its reach, but minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would resemble parental authority - but where a parent prepares children for adulthood and independence, this power seeks only to keep its subjects in perpetual childhood, content that they should enjoy themselves so long as they think of nothing but enjoyment. It would work for their happiness, but insist on being the sole agent and judge of it. It would provide for their security, manage their industry, regulate their inheritances, divide their property - relieving them, step by step, of all the trouble of thinking and living for themselves. It would not break wills but soften them, bend them, guide them; not tyrannise but enervate, extinguish, stupefy; until each nation was reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, with the government as its shepherd.
The genius and horror of this vision lie in its gentleness. The old despotism was hateful and therefore resisted; it struck at the body, made martyrs, provoked rebellion. The new despotism is lovable, and therefore far harder to resist: it does not oppress, it provides; it does not terrorise, it cares; it does not demand sacrifice, it offers comfort. And because it gives the people what they want - security, ease, the freedom to pursue their private pleasures undisturbed - they embrace it, lean on it, ask it for more. They do not feel enslaved; they feel cared for. The chains are so soft, so padded with benevolence, that the people who wear them mistake them for the comforts of a good life. This is why Tocqueville thought it the peculiar danger of democratic, equal, comfort-loving peoples: not that a tyrant would seize their freedom by force, but that they would give it away, gently and gratefully, in exchange for the mild, all-providing care of a benevolent state - and would not even notice, until too late, that in becoming so well-tended they had ceased to be free. The most terrible thing about soft despotism is that its victims consent to it, and call it good.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned Tocqueville’s concepts of “individualism” and “soft despotism.” Explain in your own words what he meant by each, and how he thought the first could lead, through a benevolent path, to the second.
Leads to Benjamin Constant.
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