A great thinker of the 19th century was born in France: Alexis Henri Charles de Cl\u00e9rel, better known as Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859).<\/p>\n
Tocqueville was a Catholic and has long been considered one of the leading figures of conservative liberalism. In his book \"De la d\u00e9mocratie en Am\u00e9rique\" (Democracy in America), he warned against the excesses, abuses, and despotic practices in democratic countries<\/strong>, focusing particularly on the American experience. The work was published in two volumes, the first in 1835 and the second in 1840.<\/p>\n In the second volume, Tocqueville outlined the characteristics of what is known as \"soft despotism,\"<\/strong> a very current phenomenon. Tocqueville's words were prophetic. I quote these two paragraphs from Book Four of the second volume of that work, specifically from Chapter VI, entitled \"What kind of despotism should democratic nations fear?\"<\/em><\/strong> (I have taken it from the edition of the book published in English by The Pennsylvania State University in 2002, with a translation by Henry Reeve):<\/p>\n \"I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world<\/strong>. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives<\/strong>. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest \u2013 his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow-citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not \u2013 he touches them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country. Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate.<\/strong> That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood:<\/strong> it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances<\/strong> \u2013 what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent<\/strong>; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things:<\/strong> it has predisposed men to endure them, and oftentimes to look on them as benefits.<\/p>\n After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp, and fashioned them at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community.<\/strong> 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:<\/strong> 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 be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described, might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom; and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people. Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions; they want to be led, and they wish to remain free:<\/strong> as they cannot destroy either one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty<\/strong>; this gives them a respite; they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading- strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large that holds the end of his chain. By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master, and then relapse into it again.<\/strong> A great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large. This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience.<\/strong>\"<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n It is curious to think that this text was published in 1840<\/strong>, because 186 years later it seems a faithful description of a problem that has been increasing in many democratic countries, making the individual less and less free and more and more dependent on the State.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A great thinker of the 19th century was born in France: Alexis Henri Charles de Cl\u00e9rel, better known as Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[10375],"tags":[1545,10368,26956],"class_list":["post-64826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","tag-alexis-de-tocqueville","tag-liberalism","tag-soft-despotism"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-11 20:03:04","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64826\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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