While many are preparing to celebrate Milton Friedman’s birthday on Friday, those who cherish freedom would be remiss to overlook the birth of another great champion of liberty, French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville – born on this day in 1805. Tocqueville’s ruminations on American civil society and the French Revolution continue to guide classical liberal thought. He investigated the culture of liberty and association, the relationship between equality and individualism, and the differences between his homeland and his muse, the United States.
There is a chapter in Democracy in America on soft despotism that I think is especially germane today:
It would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them…After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
We can tip our toppers to Monsieur Tocqueville, a great thinker and classical liberal.
Thanks to David Boaz for including “What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear” in The Libertarian Reader.
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