Tocqueville on the Welfare State

Jon Education, Government, Market Commentary, Socialism

In 1961, Robert Schuettinger, then a graduate student under F. A. Hayek at the University of Chicago, wrote an article: “Tocqueville and the Bland Leviathan.”
It was published in the second issue of a new publication, New Individualist Review. This was a student publication: a quarterly small magazine. It was the best student publication I had ever seen. I still think so. I was a subscriber from the beginning. It was published for seven years.
The Foundation for Economic Education has reprinted the essay here. I offer extracts.
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[The power of government] 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 tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, until each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and hard-working animals, of which the government is the shepherd.’ – Alexis De Tocqueville
Alexis De Tocqueville was an aristocrat who was at the same time the most perceptive critic and the truest friend that democracy ever had; he loved liberty, as he himself said, with “a holy passion,” and his greatest fear was that in the new Age of the Common Man the ideal of equality would become the means by which freedom would be extinguished.
His two books, Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the French Revolution, earned for Tocqueville a lasting reputation primarily because he did not think that the historian’s role should be confined to relating facts or that the sociologist should be merely a statistician; he was interested in something more than in what the “scientific” historians called wie es gewesen (what actually happened). What he wanted to do was to understand why institutions grew up and why events came about. Describing America he regarded as much less important than the task of analyzing democracy. . . .

This post was published at Gary North on November 02, 2017.