Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America. Volume I, Part I, Chapter 8, subchapter 22: “On the Advantages of the Federal System Generally, and Its Special Utility for America.”
In order to construct modern, centralized states on the model advocated by Machiavelli, European monarchs weakened the aristocratic class, which had ruled feudal states characterized by weak monarchs and powerful landlords. Weak aristocracies meant increasingly egalitarian civil societies within the modern states, whether their regimes were monarchic or republican. For Alexis de Tocqueville, ‘democracy’ is not itself a regime, and equality is neither a natural or legal right; democracy is a social condition, one that must be understood clearly if it is not to descend into despotism. As the most thoroughly democratized society in the world in the 1830s (this, despite slavery), America fascinated the young French aristocrat, living in the aftermath of the debacle of French republicanism in the 1790s and of French monarchy in the 1780s and again in the Napoleonic Wars.
Differing from feudal states in their degree of centralization, modern states also differed from ancient city-states in size, being far larger in both territory and population. In small states, Tocqueville remarks, “the eyes of society penetrate everywhere” (as the popular song advises, “Don’t try that in a small town”), and ambitions are modest (no Napoleon has arisen from Slovenia). In small states, “internal well-being” takes precedence over “the vain smoke of glory.” Manners and morals are “simple and peaceful,” inequality of wealth less pronounced. Political freedom is the “natural condition” of small states; in all times, antiquity (Athens) and modernity (Switzerland), “small nations have been cradles of political freedom.”
They lose that freedom on those rare occasions when they eventually muster the power to expand. “The history of the world does not furnish an example of a great nation that has long remained a republic,” whether the nation was ancient Rome or modern France. That is because “all the passions fatal to republics grow with the extent of territory, whereas the virtues that serve as their support do not increase in the same measure.” The gulf between rich and poor widens; great cities arise, with their “depravity of morals”; individuals become less patriotic because their country seems less immediately real to them; accordingly, individuals become less patriotic, more selfish. This is worse for republican regimes than for monarchies, as republics depend upon citizen virtue while monarchy “makes use of the people and does not depend on them.” In sum, “nothing is so contrary to the well-being and freedom of men as great empires.”
This notwithstanding, “great states” enjoy some substantial advantages. While morally injurious, their cities are “like vast intellectual centers,” where “ideas circulate more freely” than in the more censorious atmosphere of small communities. The people are safer from invasion, since the borders are remote from much of the population. Above all, great states wield greater force than small states, and the security force obtains “is one of the first conditions of happiness and even existence for nations.” Tocqueville “does not know of a condition more deplorable than that of a people that cannot defend itself or be self-sufficient.”
What, then, shall republican lawgivers do? The American Founders took the recommendation of Montesquieu: federalism, which (as Publius argues in the tenth Federalist), permits Americans to live in an “extended” republic, one that can preserve the virtues needed for republicanism while enjoying the advantages of a large modern state. [1] While the Congress “regulates the principal actions of social existence,” it leaves administrative details to the “provincial legislatures.” [2] In a democratic republic, the people are sovereign; in the United States, the people have divided their sovereignty between the federal government and the “provinces” or states. The federal government attends to the general welfare of the nation, but can act only through specific, enumerated powers set down in the Constitution. It can reach into the states and rule their citizens directly, but not in all, and indeed not in most, things.
This is what allows democracy or civil-social equality to ‘work’ in the United States. Because the federal government conducts American foreign policy, the states need not take on the expense and effort to defend themselves and so can concentrate their energies on internal improvements, just as small political communities incline to do. This spirit of economic enterprise is enhanced by the Constitutional prohibition of tariffs among the states, which makes American into a vast free-trade zone. The spirit of economic enterprise itself redirects ambitions toward peaceful commerce and away from military glory, the passion of aristocrats. With no arms to purchase and no wars to undertake and sustain, among state politicians “ambition for power makes way for love of well-being, a more vulgar but less dangerous passion.” “Vulgar” means not-noble, not aristocratic but democratic. Federalism thus reinforces the democratic republican regime, unlike in the South American republics of the time, where republicanism extended over large territories but under centralized governments, control of which fired ambitious souls, bringing political turmoil. In the federal republic of the United States, however, “the public spirit of the Union itself is in a way only a summation of provincial patriotism.”
Thanks to the Framers of the United States Constitution, “the Union is a great republic in extent; but one could in a way liken it to a small republic because the objects with which its government is occupied are few.” The federal government exercises substantial power but in a manner “not dangerous to freedom” because, unlike a fully centralized government, it does not “excite those immoderate desires for power and attention that are so fatal to great republics,” whether in ancient Rome, modern France, or modern Brazil. Such desires that do arise “break against the individual interests and passions of the states,” jealous defenders of their own share of popular sovereignty.
In the civil society of American democracy within a federal system, “the Union is free and happy like a small nation, glorious and strong like a great one.”
American federalism did in fact guarantee civil liberty with civil equality, even as the extended republic extended itself from the Atlantic to the Pacific in a vast imperial project. Tocqueville worried that Americans were going too fast, that their liberties were in danger, but by 1890, when the American frontier was judged to have been ‘closed,’ the original republic stood, and without the scourge of slavery that had compromised republicanism in the South. The foreign threats that became more acute with the invention of steam-powered battleships, threatening the country’s ocean trade routes, was settled by establishing not an overseas empire, as some advocated, but a network of naval bases from Cuba to the Philippines, countries whose governance Americans gladly handed back to the peoples in them, in the decades following their acquisition from Spain. The real danger arose not from foreign policy but from domestic policy, a danger Tocqueville also warned against. Ambitious men in the twentieth century first ‘theorized’ and then implemented a substantial federal bureaucracy, ‘professionalizing’ government and thereby weakening the civic spirit of Americans, whose local, county, and state governments now depended upon decisions implemented by the national ‘administrative state.’ This effected a regime change, whereby the democratic republic of the Founders became what Aristotle would call a ‘mixed’ regime consisting of elected officials, some of them a bit Caesar-like, and a tenured set of experts, whom no one elects, and no one can remove except by abolishing the agencies which serve as their platform for rule.
Notes
- See Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws, Part II, Book 9: “On the laws in their relation to defensive force.”
- Tocqueville uses the term “provincial” rather than “state” because his European readers associated statehood with sovereignty, which American states wield only in part, and only as representatives of the true sovereigns, the citizens.
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