Tocqueville Associations Quotes

The territorial aristocracy of former ages was either bound by law, or thought itself bound by usage, to come to the relief of its serving-men and to relieve their distress. But the manufacturing aristocracy of our age first impoverishes and debases the men who serve it and then abandons them to be supported by the charity of the public. This is a natural consequence of what has been said before. Between the workman and the master there are frequent relations, but no real association. I am of the opinion, on the whole, that the manufacturing aristocracy which is growing up under our eyes is one of the harshest that ever existed in the world; but at the same time it is one of the most confined and least dangerous. Nevertheless, the friends of democracy should keep their eyes anxiously fixed in this direction; for if ever a permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy again penetrates into the world, it may be predicted that this is the gate by which they will enter.

The two chief weapons which parties use in order to ensure success are the public press and the formation of associations.

In nations where it exists, every individual takes an equal share in sovereign power and participates equally in the government of the state. Thus he is considered as enlightened, virtuous, strong as any of his fellow men. Why then does he obey society and what are the normal limits of his obedience? He obeys not because he holds an inferior position to those who run the administration or is less capable than his neighbor of self-government but because he recognizes the usefulness of his association with his fellow men and because he knows that this association cannot exist without a regulating power. While he has become a subject in all the mutual duties of citizens, he remains master in his own affairs where he is free and answerable only to God and his action. Out of that grows the general truth that the individual is the sole and best placed judge of his own private concerns and society has the right to control his actions only when it feels such actions cause it damage or needs to seek the cooperation of the individual.

To say that all individuals are embedded in and the product of society is banal. Obama rises above banality by means of fallacy: equating society with government, the collectivity with the state. Of course we are shaped by our milieu. But the most formative, most important influence on the individual is not government. It is civil society, those elements of the collectivity that lie outside government: family, neighborhood, church, Rotary club, PTA, the voluntary associations that Tocqueville understood to be the genius of America and the source of its energy and freedom.

first networked polity. ‘In no country in the world,’ declared Tocqueville, ‘has the principle of association been more successfully used or applied to a greater multitude of objects than in America’:

It is difficult to associate a people in the work of government; but it is still more difficult to supply it with experience, and to inspire it with the feelings which it requires in order to govern well.

This highly negative narrative about interest groups stands in sharp contrast, however, to a much more positive one about the benefits of civil society, or voluntary associations, to the health of democracy. Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America noted that Americans had a strong propensity for organizing private associations, which he argued were “schools for democracy” because they taught private individuals the skills of coming together for public purposes.

In no country has such constant care been taken as in America to trace two clearly distinct lines of action for the two sexes, and to make them keep pace one with the other, but in two pathways which are always different. American women never manage the outward concerns of the family, or conduct a business, or take a part in political life; nor are they, on the other hand, ever compelled to perform the rough labor of the fields, or to make any of those laborious exertions which demand the exertion of physical strength. No families are so poor as to form an exception to this rule. If on the one hand an American woman cannot escape from the quiet circle of domestic employments, on the other hand she is never forced to go beyond it. Hence it is that the women of America, who often exhibit a masculine strength of understanding and a manly energy, generally preserve great delicacy of personal appearance and always retain the manners of women, although they sometimes show that they have the hearts and minds of men. Nor have the Americans ever supposed that one consequence of democratic principles is the subversion of marital power, of the confusion of the natural authorities in families. They hold that every association must have a head in order to accomplish its object, and that the natural head of the conjugal association is man. They do not therefore deny him the right of directing his partner; and they maintain, that in the smaller association of husband and wife, as well as in the great social community, the object of democracy is to regulate and legalize the powers which are necessary, not to subvert all power.

Between social mobilization and liberal democracy From Alexis de Tocqueville onward there has been a large body of democratic theory arguing that modern liberal democracy cannot exist without a vigorous civil society.29 The mobilization of social groups allows weak individuals to pool their interests and enter the political system; even when social groups do not seek political objectives, voluntary associations have spillover effects in fostering the ability of individuals to work with one another in novel situations—what is termed social capital. The correlation noted above linking economic growth to stable liberal democracy presumably comes about via the channel of social mobilization: growth entails the emergence of new social actors who then demand representation in a more open political system and press for a democratic transition. When the political system is well institutionalized and can accommodate these new actors, then there is a successful transition to full democracy. This is what happened with the rise of farmers’ movements and socialist parties in Britain and Sweden in the early decades of the twentieth century, and in South Korea after the fall of the military dictatorship in 1987. A highly developed civil society can also pose dangers for democracy and can even lead to political decay. Groups based on ethnic or racial chauvinism spread intolerance; interest groups can invest effort in zero-sum rent seeking; excessive politicization of economic and social conflicts can paralyze societies and undermine the legitimacy of democratic institutions. 30 Social mobilization can lead to political decay. The Huntingtonian process whereby political institutions failed to accommodate demands of new social actors for participation arguably happened in Bolivia and Ecuador in the 1990s and 2000s with the repeated unseating of elected presidents by highly mobilized social groups.31

Alexis de Tocqueville toured the United States in the early 1830s and famously proclaimed the emergence of Homo democraticus, a cheeky creature whose passion for equality and self-interest was tempered only by his ability to join fellow citizens in all manner of mutual associations for pragmatic benefit.

De Tocqueville concisely summarized the crowding out problem: “The more government takes the place of associations, the more will individuals lose the idea of forming associations and need the government to come to their help. That is a vicious circle of cause and effect.

As De Tocqueville understood, voluntary associations and governments often clash because they pit decentralized, market decision-making against centralized, politicized power.3

If men are to remain civilized, the art of associating together must grow

Thus it was that the pioneering communities of America very quickly made laws for themselves, formed clubs, schools, rescue squads and committees in order to deal with the needs that they could not address alone, but for which they depended on the cooperation of their neighbours. The associative habit that so impressed Tocqueville was not merely an expression of freedom: it was an instinctive move towards government, in which a shared order would contain and amplify the responsibilities of the citizens.

À la date de 1649, on voit se former à Boston une association solennelle ayant pour but de prévenir le luxe mondain des longs cheveux (E).

J'ai vu des Américains s'associer pour envoyer des prêtres dans les nouveaux États de l'Ouest, et pour y fonder des écoles et des églises; ils craignent que la religion ne vienne à se perdre au milieu des bois, et que le peuple qui s'élève ne puisse être aussi libre que celui dont il est sorti. J'ai rencontré des habitants riches de la Nouvelle-Angleterre qui abandonnaient le pays de leur naissance dans le but d'aller jeter, sur les bords du Missouri ou dans les prairies des Illinois, les fondements du christianisme et de la liberté. C'est ainsi qu'aux États-Unis le zèle religieux s'échauffe sans cesse au foyer du patriotisme.

The two chief weapons which parties use in order to obtain success are the newspapers and public associations.

In their authoritative 1995 work, Voice and Equality, political scientists Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady demonstrated that political activity varied by class. Their study found that 86 percent of high-income people reported having voted, but only 52 percent of low-income people said they voted. And 73 percent of high-income people were involved with a political organization, compared to 29 percent of low-income people. A 2012 sequel by the same authors showed a widening of these patterns, as institutions of working-class participation such as trade unions continued to decline, while the influence of the wealthy concentrated. The affluent go to meetings, are active members of groups concerned with public issues, and develop “civic skills” far more than the poor do—and that disparity has been widening. The iconic Norman Rockwell painting of an ordinary working fellow standing up to speak his mind at a town meeting, meant to depict one of FDR’s Four Freedoms, belongs to another era. And yet, in the Trump rebellion, regular working people who had little regard for civic norms abruptly recovered their voices in a fashion characteristic of mass society—disaffected people sharing not always rational rage with an irrational leader. They even formed new, Tocqueville-style associations, the Tea Parties. Voice and Equality concluded that lower-income people participate at lower rates for three reasons: “they can’t” (because they lack the time or money); “they don’t want to” (because they don’t believe that politics will make a positive difference in their lives); and “nobody asked them” (the political system has few avenues of recruitment for lower-income people). In a survey of why so many people avoided politics, one key reason was that politics felt irrelevant. This view, of course, was also correlated by social class. Nobody in large corporations believes that politics is irrelevant. Trust in government—and in all major institutions—has been falling for half a century. When the American National Election Study first asked the question in 1958, 73 percent of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing “just about always” or “most of the time.” That sense of trust peaked in 1964, at 78 percent, and has been steadily dropping ever since. By 2015, it was down to just 19 percent. The

In the United States, warlike valor is little prized; the courage that is best known and most esteemed is that which makes one brave the furies of the ocean to arrive sooner in port, to tolerate without complaint the miseries of the wilderness, and the solitude, more cruel than all its miseries; the courage that renders one almost insensitive to the sudden reversal of a painfully acquired fortune and immediately prompts new efforts to construct a new one. Courage of this kind is principally necessary to the maintenance and prosperity of the American association, and it is particularly honored and glorified by it. One cannot show oneself to be lacking it without dishonor.

American society was justly famed in the nineteenth century for the richness of its associational life. Indeed, as we have seen, Alexis de Tocqueville had seen this as one of the foundations of the country’s success as a democracy. Yet the very ease with which social networks could form in the United States created a vulnerability that was ruthlessly exploited by a foreign network imported into the country during the great influx of migrants from southern Italy that occurred in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth: the Mafia.

The most natural privilege of man, next to the right of acting for himself, is that of combining his exertions with those of his fellow-creatures, and of acting in common with them. I am therefore led to conclude that the right of association is almost as inalienable as the right of personal liberty. No legislator can attack it without impairing the very foundations of society.