Category: Politics

Social Movements, Institutions, and Rights

I have, obviously, been thinking a lot lately about how protest politics can take a form that actually moves the ball down the field, that has some impact.  The following post is in response to some feedback I have gotten from a friend about a more formal version of my complaint that leftist social movement fight shy of formalization, of institutionalization,–and thus rob themselves of the chance to have a real impact.  That essay is called “Intellectuals in Dark Times” and focuses in on the allergy to leaders, to any division of labor in contemporary movements like Occupy. And I am responding to my friend’s essay on the attempt to use the notion of “rights” to address environmental issues.

The usual line of thought is that social movements often fight shy of institutionalization, but that it is very hard for them to consolidate any gains if their goals are not taken up by some institution.  So, for example, a social movement can advocate for no discrimination on the basis of sexual preference, but until there are anti-discriminatory laws that formally recognize equality, provide means of redress against discrimination, and sanctions against those who discriminate, then the social movement can’t move from “protest” about the way things are to an actual change in prevailing conditions.

It is certainly—and importantly—the case that social movements are often very good at mobilizing a constituency toward some end, and in changing general cultural attitudes.  A classic case is the gay rights movement.  Another is MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving).  Attitudes toward gays and toward driving while drunk changed noticeably (and astoundingly quickly), largely because of those movements.  But I don’t see how that attitude shift is consolidated unless translated (as it was in both cases) into formal, legal changes.

So I would look at #MeTOO and Black Lives Matter in similar ways.  They are raising an issue to public awareness and (let’s hope) changing attitudes.  But until there are also legal sanctions for the police who shoot unarmed blacks (seems to be very, very, very slow progress on that front) or for men who harass women (still a long way to go), I can’t see those movements as successful.  What troubles me are the movements that fight shy of any kind of political, legal outcome at all.

The notion of “prefigurative” has become very common not just in the literature but in the expressed views of the anti-globalization activists.  I had not read Todd Gitlin’s book on Occupy when I wrote the essay.  It’s a good book and a quick read.  He bends over backwards to be sympathetic to Occupy’s anarchism and is good on its refusal to dignify politicians with the authority of being petitioned to.  Instead, the theory went, Occupy would create the society it wanted—not request some imagined powerful others (the politicians) to redress wrongs or reform the corrupt society.  The trouble of course was that Occupy’s alternative society proved unsustainable.  You need a lot of things to have a functioning society—and Occupy was against many of those things on principle.

Gitlin addresses the leaderless stuff as well.  So, yes, let’s say that #MeToo is leaderless. It really is a spontaneous outbreak, in many places at once, and helpfully consolidated by the new digital media.  No one voice stands out among the rest—and part of its glory is that egalitarianism.  The issue for me is: What next?  The open chorus of voices can continue quite some time, until people get tired of that, and move on to the next thing.  Some participants in Occupy, as Gitlin documents, were aware of this problem.  Members of the movement had to have something to do.  Maybe we should call this the tyranny of narrative.  There has to be some sense of forward movement, not just the continual repetition of the same. (I have the same objection to the left’s marches.  Just to keep marching accomplishes nothing.)

So leadership at the very least must devise tactics, things to do that will move the ball forward.  (Hardt and Negri in Assembly concede this point, but then claim the movement itself, as mass leaderless democracy, must devise the strategy.  But their tactics/strategy bright line is hard to understand and, I would think, even harder to maintain in practice.)

Even more, I am arguing that moving the ball forward necessitates at some point the moment of institutionalization.  Which, of course, makes your question about the definition of institution central.  In some sense it’s a tautology: an institution is any formal structure that a) codifies its goals and procedures, and b) establishes the means to ensure its sustainability (over, at least, the medium term).  What are those “means” of sustainability?  For starters, at the minimum, the human and financial resources required to, so to speak, stay in the field.  There must be people who are doing the work and who we can be sure will be doing the work next week and (we hope) next year.  And there also must be people (the wider base) that can be called upon on for set occasions when a more massive presence is needed.  And there must be the money to support those people and the movement’s chosen activities.  Additionally, it is probably inevitable that there be some kind of by-laws (some rules of procedure) and some kind of division of labor (which may very well lead to hierarchy and also to forms of accountability).  The “formality” of institutions comes, then, from having a defined set of goals, an explicit codification of procedures and tasks that are aimed toward achieving that goal, along with a plan for raising the resources required to do the work to reach the goal.

In order to get that far, it also seems inevitable that you are going to need a) the wordsmiths who articulate the movement’s goals and core attitudes in ways that inspire people to join the movement and keep them inspired once they are in the door (the intellectuals if you will) and b) those who hold themselves personally accountable for the movement’s advancement toward its goals and inspire others to also assume similar responsibility (call these people leaders).  There are other roles, but you get the idea.

So I am not taking “the law” per se as the prototypical institution.  I guess I would say that an institution is “legal” once it has the political (or state) authority for its articulated codes and procedures to be enforced generally (i.e. over the whole citizenry of a state).  Many movements, then, will aim for its specific goals to become “legal” in exactly that sense.  But not all movements will have that aspiration.  Think of an artistic movement; it will be much looser in both its institutional forms than the civil rights movement (with its various organizations like the SNCC, the NAACP etc.) and with no desire to achieve legal reform.  But even something like Impressionism or Abstract Expressionism will depend on something more formal than a movement even if less formal than a full-blown institution if it is to thrive.  It will need to have fairly self-consciously formed networks of galleries, news and other media outlets, patrons, sympathetic museums, and a sense of who is in the fold and who isn’t.  It can’t, in other words, only exist in “presence,” in the face-to-face moments of direct interaction (which is what Occupy seems to aspire to—and, oddly enough, we can also say was often Arendt’s utopian vision of the political as an ephemeral “space of appearances” created by a group being together.  It is that Arendtian vision that Hardt and Negri–and Judith Butler in a different key that I find more convincing–are reaching for in their celebrations of “assembly,” the people coming out together to share time in the streets.)

So I guess I am arguing that I don’t see how a movement like #MeToo can advance its political agenda without institutionalizing to some extent—and that it can’t institutionalize without having some intellectuals and some leaders.  Does that—and here is the fear—make me a Leninist?  This worry is deeply ingrained in the left, quickly described (if over simplistically) as the debate between anarchists and advocates of “the party.”  It has more recently been re-inscribed as the debate between “direct” (or “participatory”) democracy and some acceptance of the need for “representation.”

Now I am really going to try your patience because I am going to tie your essay on rights to this classic leftist debate.  It is very common to think of rights as “legitimate claims.”  This is a very “pragmatic” way of theorizing rights—where “pragmatic” here refers less to Deweyean pragmatism than to the “pragmatics” of the linguists, which can be tied back to Wittgenstein’s insistence that the meaning of word resides in its use.  So think of rights as part of a “language game” or even of a “form of life.”  As a move in the language game, to state I have a right to something is to make a claim on the other players of the game.  That claim must, first, be recognized by those others as legitimate, as a claim to which they are accountable, answerable.  If I claim my right to your car, I will be dismissed out of hand.  But if I assert a claim to a high school education, that claim is most likely deemed legitimate within the prevailing language game in the US, but perhaps not when a teenage girl makes it in Afghanistan.

So, for starters, when we talk about rights, we are talking about (contestable) claims that we make upon one another.  A constitution and bill of rights represent attempts to place certain rights beyond contestability, to say that they are, for once and for all, legitimate.  Of course, that doesn’t stop them from being contested in individual court cases, but the constitution and bill of rights is supposed to provide solid grounds for deciding such cases.

The constitution, of course, also does something else.  It established that the state’s power will be placed in the service of protecting those rights herein designated as legitimate.  The problem Arendt highlights—and that became salient in the wake of World War II but which Madison already was writing about in the 1780s—is how to handle situations where what we have come to think of as rights must be protected against the state’s abrogation of them.  What is the enforcing, protective power in that case?  And also what about people who are “stateless.”?  To whom do such people even address their claim—and who will protect them since they are not recognized as any state’s responsibility?  The notion of “human rights” was created in the context of also creating international organizations such as the United Nations as an attempt to address this dilemma.  This attempted solution has proved woefully inadequate to solve the problem, but nothing better has been devised (or instituted).

Now, on top of that crisis/failure, comes the dilemma your essay highlights: how to think the rights of non-human entities.  Since I think of rights as discursive, as established within a language game of call (claim) and response, I don’t see how the rights of non-human entities can figure into the game unless they are “represented” by humans.  That is, there is an inevitable “translation” here.  We can think of that translation as going in either direction (I don’t think it makes much difference which description we choose.  Others might argue it makes a huge difference.)  Alternative one would be to say that we take a notion of “rights’ developed in human political discourse as a way of talking about, adjudicating, and acting upon the claims we have/make upon one another as we attempt to live together in a shared world—and we now transpose that notion of rights as a handy way to talk about the claims non-human entities could/would/should make (if they could talk) as co-inhabitants of that same shared world.  So humans are “extending” rights to non-human entities by couching the perceived needs of those entities in “rights talk.”  (The anti-humanists would object here that the perceiving of those needs is done by humans.)

The alternative would be to say that non-human entities have various ways of communicating their needs and requirements to us—but (I would still argue) it requires an act of translation, from those non-human communications into the human language of rights, to have the non-human claims enter into our political discourse of rights.  In other words, I don’t see how the non-human enters the realm of rights except as voiced by a human advocate.  I know radical anti-humanists hate this conclusion, but I don’t see how to avoid it.

So we seem to be left with: Rights talk is a human contrivance—so all application of rights talk to the inhuman involves a questionable translation of humanist terms to a sphere distinct from the human.  (I think your essay was tending in that direction.)  The only way out of this would be to let the non-human speak for itself.  But I guess I am with Wittgenstein: if the lion could talk, we wouldn’t understand him.  No understanding across that barrier without translation—with the sense that yes, of course, something is going to be lost in the translation, but that’s the best we’ve got.  The search for pristine, perfect solutions aspires to a logically unassailable state that is unattainable, while also imagining a moral purity that sees every trade-off as reprehensible.  William James says the “trail of the human serpent is over all.”  Once within human languages, we are doomed to “representation” with all its imperfections and inadequacies.

Goaded by those imperfections, we keep on writing, thinking maybe the next time I will say it better.

Biopower/Biopolitics

Foucault introduces the notion of “biopower” as a supplement to his theory of “disciplinary power.”  He argues, convincingly in my view, that what we might call the “welfare state” slowly emerges from about 1750 on.  That state takes ensuring the welfare of its citizens, promoting and even providing the means toward sustaining life, as one of its primary missions—or even its fundamental reason to exist, the very basis of its legitimacy.  The state that can protect, preserve, and even enhance the life of its citizens is a state worthy of their allegiance and obedience.  It seems plausible to claim that the Roman empire did not value citizens’ lives in this way, or that medieval kingdoms did not place each citizen’s welfare as a central value the polity was pledged to honor.

Typical of Foucault is his desire to focus on the way that something which is often celebrated as “progress” in fact carries significant costs that a Whiggish history ignores.  We can use the term “liberalism” to designate the traditional story (even though, as I have argued vehemently over the years, it makes no sense to accuse 20th century liberals of buying this story; we must distinguish, at the very least, “classical” from “modern”—or 29th century—liberalism).  The liberal story has several parts: a) consent of the governed to the state’s power in return for protection, for the preservation of life; b) the rise of the individual, which is why every life is equally entitled to that protection; and c) the establishment of “rights” that aim to protect citizens from the potential abuses of power by the state itself.  Liberty, in this understanding of the world liberalism establishes, is meaningless without security.  Only someone who is confident that his life will continue will be able to act out the kinds of long-term plans and undertake the kinds of initiatives that make liberty a reality.  This notion of the necessary preconditions of liberty gets expanded as the 19th century moves into the 20th to include what sometimes get called “social rights” (to contrast them to “political rights.”)  Social rights are claims upon the polity to provide the “means” to life: namely, food, shelter, education, health care, clean air and water, the list can go on.  Political rights, on the other hand, are direct protections against undue interference in a citizen’s behavior: freedom of speech, religion, assembly, along with legal rights against preventive detention, arbitrary imprisonment, and rights of participation, including the right to vote, to run for office, and to form/join political parties.

Foucault had, with his work on disciplinary power, made a compelling case that the advent of individualism, usually seen as a progressive step toward valuing all lives (if not equally, at least in ways that proclaimed that no life could be legitimately sacrificed), offered pathways to the intensification of power.  Namely, each individual becomes a target for power’s intervention.  (Strictly speaking, of course, we should say each body becomes a site for power’s intervention—and that power produces individuals out of bodies.)  Liberal political orders exist hand-in-hand with an economic order (one Foucault resists calling capitalism) that is determined to make each person as productive as possible.  A whole series of disciplinary techniques are applied at a multiplicity of sites through a society to insure that individuals are up to the mark, that they are, as the phrase goes, “productive members of society.”  And all kinds of punishments are devised for those who prove deviant, where deviance comes in an astounding variety of forms.  Disciplinary power “articulates” the social field with finer and finer gradations of acceptable behavior, with every citizen constantly being measured (through endless processes of examination) against the various norms.

Disciplinary power, then, works upon each individual.  Compulsory education is one of its innovations; the highly organized factory is another, the creation and training of the mass citizen army another.  In each case, every body in the ranks must be made to conform, to play its part.

Biopwer, by way of contrast, works on populations.  The nation that takes “life” as its raison d’etre will focus attention on individual life, but it will also be concerned with the general preservation of the nation as well.  That is, it will become interested in birth and death rates, working to raise life expectancy, to lessen infant mortality, to  encourage pregnancy and attend to the health of pregnant women.  The statistical (general) knowledge that can be generated about such things will suggest various large-scale interventions by state power.  The most obvious one are in public health measures: laws (regulations) to protect air and water quality, but also the outlawing of “dangerous” drugs and the interdiction of suicide.

At some points, Foucault appears to be simply describing something that is so familiar to us, so taken for granted, that it is practically invisible.  The state’s power increases when we, as citizens, grant it the right to enforce various public health measures.  We could say, in a similar fashion, that state power increases if we make it one of the state’s responsibilities to provide public transport.  The gathering of money and the granting of jobs involved in creating and running a public transport system must entail the state having more power.  After all, power is not just power over (any employer has power over employees, and the state is no different in that regard) but also power to.  The state would not have the power to (ability to) run a transportation system unless it had power.  So the more duties we assign to the state, the more power it, necessarily, accumulates (unless it is totally ineffectual).

However, as many readers of Foucault have noted, his discussions of power quite often come with the distinct flavor of “critique,” in a dual sense: first, as a revelation of power’s presence where either ideology (semi-deliberate masking of the reality) or taken-for-grantedness hide that presence, and second, as a strongly implied normative criticism of power as illegitimate, evil, or pernicious.  Some commentators have even started to wonder if Foucault has affinities with ne0liberals insofar as he associates state power with tyranny.  I think that is going too far because Foucault (especially with disciplinary power) was very attuned to the ways in which power is exercised in non-state venues (like the factory) and certainly never thought of the economic sphere, of private enterprise, as a site of liberty unrestrained by power.  But his temperamental anarchy does make his approach certain libertarian positions in troubling ways—since, in my view, the libertarian is absurdly naïve, being blind to power’s presence in ways that Foucault has taught us to mistrust.  Power is everywhere—and always with us.  (Hence other readers of Foucault have taken “power” to be the “god-term” in his work.)  Instead of the anarchist dream of a world without power, my view is we have to think about ways to rein in power, to limits its abuse, and that means distributing power in ways that neither state or employers have enough power to leave their citizens or their employees without effective recourse against abuses.  Foucault, however, never goes in that direction.  After identifying the many sites where power is exercised, and implying that such exercises are not good things, he has nothing more to say about how we might or should respond to that situation.

Foucault has a particular reason for thinking biopower pernicious: his argument that it leads to racism.  I will take up that argument tomorrow—since it is the direct claim that a “politics of life” leads to the infliction of large-scale death.  For now, one last point: biopower is not biopolitics.  There are lots of ways of understanding “politics,” but one fairly basic definition of the term would be “pertaining to the collective arrangement of ways of living together with others.”  That is, we don’t have politics until more than one party is involved in the creation (through negotiation, or legislation, or other means) of the arrangements—and where the goal is to establish a modus vivendi that enables sustainable co-existence (which means at least semi-peaceful and semi-stable ways of muddling along).  “Biopower” only identifies where and how power, focused on issues/questions of “life,” intervenes, is exercised.  “Biopoliitcs” attends to the ways that placing the question of “life” prominently among the issues a society must address leads to certain political debates/decisions/conflicts in the ongoing collective effort to forge the terms of sociality.  We might say that “biopower” suggests a passivity of the part of power’s subjects—a passivity Foucualt always claimed he never intended to convey, yet nonetheless inflicts a vision that is as “apolitical” as his.  An odd charge, I know, since Foucault seems intensely political.  But his work rarely attends to the collective processes through which power is created and its specific techniques are forged.  Instead, power appears out of the cloud like the God in the Book of Job.  And it proves just about as unaccountable as that God as well.  You can resist it the way you might kick your broken-down car but you can’t get under the hood and actually tinker with its workings.  It takes a political vision to imagine that kind of transformative work, a work that would involve negotiation and compromise with others, and the eventual creation of legal and institutional frameworks (invariably imperfect).  It would require, in other words, a belief in the power of people to intervene in history, in place of the kind of transcendent power Foucault presents us with.

Centralization, Freedom, and Bourgeois Desire

Tocqueville mostly discusses political centralization, the collecting of power in the central state.  He shows how that centralization empties out the provinces in two ways: 1. It leads elites to move to the metropole and to the court, an especially severe problem in France because Paris becomes everything; and 2. It turns provincials into imbeciles because they have no responsibility for their own welfare or governance.  Strip people of any ability to shape their own destiny and of any responsibility to see that things actually function and you make them passive, sullen, apathetic, cynical, and bitter (perhaps not all five, but some combination of this soup.)

Tocqueville is less interested in economic centralization.  But he does recognize that economic inequality is a serious problem for any polity.  His way of thinking about this is curious. He believes that all Frenchmen are becoming increasingly alike.  His basis for this claim, never made explicit, seems to be that everyone now pursues economic gain. Self interest of the Adam Smith variety is now universal.  It is here that Tocqueville’s idealization of the “manly virtues” (a term he uses constantly) of the aristocracy is hardest to credit.  “The men of the eighteenth century were hardly aware of that form of passion for material comfort which is tantamount to being the mother of servitude, a feeling, flabby yet tenacious and unchanging, which is ready to fuse and, as it were, entwine itself around several private virtues such as love of family, reliable customs, deference to religious beliefs and a lukewarm and regular practice of established Christian ritual.  While this supports integrity, it forbids heroism and excels in turning men into well-behaved but craven citizens.  Those men were both better and worse.”  Against this timid middle class, always worried about its financial well-being and security, we get the “ancient idols” of the aristocracy: “Courage, reputation and, I dare say, generosity” (122 in the Penguin Classic edition).

But that aristocracy has been destroyed and we must acknowledge that “much more freedom existed then (during the ancien régime) than nowadays,” although Tocqueville admits that this freedom was “disjointed and spasmodic” and “almost never went so far as to provide citizens with the most natural guarantees they needed” (123).  I can only guess that by “guarantees” he means rights established in law and protected in practice.  The aristocracy’s “generosity” never extended so far as to provide such rights for “citizens” (a concept that was itself foreign to aristocratic thinking).

His view on economic inequality seems to be this: we need an aristocracy that is above economic worry.  But that aristocracy only gets that privilege if it makes sure the rest of the nation doesn’t suffer penury.  By not resisting the monarchy’s over-taxation of the non-aristocrats, using its power instead to secure exemption from taxes for itself, the aristocracy of the ancien régime created the conditions for the Revolution—and the intense hatred of the other classes for the aristocracy.  If, instead, the aristocracy had resisted the monarchy’s centralization of power by attending to the local communities over which it once held sway, then the old order would not have collapsed.  Once they ceded power over the local community to centralized government, the aristocracy no longer had a distinctive function—and they became just like everyone else.

How to characterize “everyone else”?  Tocqueville understands the new reality of “equality” to mean that all the classes share the same desires—for “material comfort” as he puts it.  Thus, like Arendt much later, Tocqueville thinks the triumph of commercial society—and of the levelling that it produces by turning everyone into economic agents—also entails the destruction of a political class, a group of men (it’s always men) who pursue glory and honor, not wealth, and discover the “public happiness” of political effort.

Now comes the hard part.  Tocqueville believes that having different classes, ones with very different desires and ambitions (and, although he does not say it, very different duties and responsibilities), gives us more interconnection between the classes.  When each station has its duties, then we don’t get the competition of all against all, and we also don’t get the effort to be utterly self-reliant.  Each class needs the others—and will live amidst the others.  Paradoxically, then, less class division means less class interaction.  Once everyone is equal, once everyone is pursuing the same course of action, there is no need for interaction.  Instead, we get segregation, with like only dealing with like.

The big picture: we are all slaves to money.  We acquiesce in political centralization because we want to be left alone to pursue our fortunes.  And we have very little contact with our fellow citizens beyond commercial relations because we have no need to “associate” with them.  And, of course, just those local, small-scale “associations” are what Tocqueville believes provide the best security against the tyranny of centralization.

What he doesn’t see, of course, is the centralization of economic power.  Partly that’s because he is in deep denial about the aristocracy’s economic position even as he idealizes its political role.  He simply doesn’t seem to register economic coercion, the ways in which economic necessity tramples on freedom.  And he doesn’t see the rise of the corporation, of the urge to centralize economic power that is as much a threat as the urge to centralize political power.

Still, when we today are obsessed with the ways that economic inequality has undermined the interaction among classes (which it certainly has), it can be useful to think of the institutional and geographic formations of inequality along with tracking the dollars.  Instead of fixating on the billionaires, maybe we should think about the places—Wall Street, Silicon Valley—and the institutions—the Stock Exchange, Google—that reside in those places.  What happens when the rest of the country is emptied out—both of people and of economic resources?  Surely it is right to claim that parts of America are more foreign to each other in 2017 than they were in 1960.  Even as other parts of America—black America, gay America—are less foreign than they once were.

I know, I know: putting it this way implies “less foreign” to a certain segment of “privileged” white America.  Allow me that solecism for the nonce; I am in search of other game at the moment.  And, of course, “less foreign” hardly means anything like fully transparent.  But the point isn’t some kind of Kantian “universal communicability.”  It’s about opportunities for interaction, for daily collaboration in some common enterprise.  The Tocqueville and Arendt complaint is that we don’t have such opportunities except in commercial enterprises.  We don’t any longer govern our small communities together as places we must make work for all of us.  We have out-sourced that responsibility to central government—and, I am adding, we have also outsourced making the goods we need (food, clothing etc.) to large corporations.  In that way, the local food movement is a Tocquevillian project.

The larger point is the way that Tocqueville sees equality and freedom in tension (whereas we are liable to see them as complementary).  Freedom needs to be enacted—and, for Tocqueville, it is enacted through collective action: the making of the laws and social arrangements that we then obey because we have made them ourselves.  But equality discourages collective action.  (Here is where Tocqueville is absolutely distinct from Arendt, who firmly believes that equality enables, is a sine non qua, of collective action.)  How so?  Equality fosters individualism, the competition of all against all, even as it also generates a sense of the individual’s political powerlessness (this from Democracy in America).  How can my one vote make a difference?  Thus equality provides lots of incentives to being non-political, of simply not partaking in collective decision-making or collective implementation of those decisions.  Again, let’s just out-source those tasks.  We’ll hire our political servants to do that work for us.

The result is “thin” as opposed to “thick” democracy.  And a society in which different groups barely interact beyond commercial transactions.

Tocqueville and the Revolution

Continuing my Tocqueville inquiries by reading The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution.  A wonderful book even where it is wrong-headed.  Tocqueville is addicted to grand generalizations.  He, quite obviously, believes that there are “laws” of politics akin to natural laws—and sees his job as the discovery and articulation of those laws.  But no matter.  His desire to probe to the underlying forces, the correct causal account, is his strength as well as his weakness.  He is not a chronicler of events; he is a discerner of patterns and a moralist through and through.  Pay no heed to the fundamentals and disaster must follow is his mantra.

By temperament, of course, I want to apply his moralizing to current conditions.  But that only succeeds to a very limited extent.  The world he describes is so foreign to 21st century America that the parallels are faint.  Most important is his utter ignorance of—and disinterest in—capitalism.  His social world is comprised of a fading but reliably selfish aristocracy (content to take the nation down with it as it slips into the trash can of history), a middle class that, far from being Marx’s capitalists, are merchants and public officials, and the peasantry.  In other words, Tocqueville is not interested in (or is blind to) the production of goods apart from the agricultural.  He never once considers the economics of empire, the accumulation of capital, or the games of financial speculation.  For him, the French aristocracy has ceded its power (its actual ability to influence the course government—and the nation—takes) in return for tax exemptions, thus enabling the “centralization” of power in the hands of the monarch.

That “centralization” is the great theme of the book.  Such centralization, Tocqueville argues: 1. necessarily entails the diminution, even the complete loss, of freedom—and is the form that tyranny takes in the modern age; 2. motivates the revolution at the moment when the loss of freedom becomes too great to bear.  This mostly conservative thinker, astoundingly, writes (in an aside that belies the significance of the claim): “revolutions, which are the final safeguards of nations” (106 in the Penguin Classic edition); and 3. is evidence of the revolution’s failure.  The whole thesis of the book is that the centralization of power originated under the pre-Revolution monarchy, was what caused the Revolution, and, yet, was only intensified by the events subsequent upon the Revolution (namely, the reigns of Napoleon I and, in Tocqueville’s own time, the reign of Napoleon III, whom Tocqueville hated with admirable passion).  Thus, the continuity of French politics from 1700 to 1850 is more important, Tocqueville argues, than any other changes (decline in the power of the Catholic Church or the abolition of the Bourbon dynasty) that the Revolution did bring about.

I will get into details in subsequent posts.  But two more general, orienting comments, are in order here.  First, Tocqueville’s distinctive understanding of “liberty.”  For Tocqueville, the two great political truths of the modern age are the passions for liberty and for equality.  And the great conundrum faced by the moderns is how to make those two desirables compatible.  “Liberty” to Tocqueville means, in a very Kantian way, obedience to laws of one’s own making.  Liberty is always opposed to license in his thought.  Tyranny is being subject to laws made by others—or being subject to the license enabled by anarchy.  Liberty is the political ability to make the laws oneself—but entails the responsibility of then following (obeying) those laws.  No liberty without corresponding duties and responsibilities.

Centralization is thus the enemy of liberty because it takes the power to govern out of the hands of the people and places it in the hands of the central government.  In this respect, Tocqueville is akin to Jefferson in celebrating the town meeting and local assemblies of all sorts.  Centralization is, also, the enemy of equality because it gives some people power while depriving others of it.  Accumulation of power is, just like accumulation of capital, a generator of inequality.

But, because he is not an anarchist, Tocqueville is a believer in authority.  It is all well and good to claim authority (ultimately) rests in the people, in the demos, but there will always be wielders of authority, its functionaries.  And how to prevent a divide, an inequality, to develop between those who wield authority and those who are subject to it is a perennial problem.

This leads directly to the second point.  Tocqueville is firmly in the republican virtue tradition.  His only way of addressing the problem of the possible abuses of power, of the ill effects of power being accumulated in certain key persons, offices, or institutions is to appeal to the virtues required of the people in those offices and institutions.

I am increasingly coming to believe the virtue tradition is not wrong.  My negative way of phrasing it shows how uneasy this conclusion makes me.  But I think the alternative is very, very wrong-headed.  We are not going to devise, once and for all, a fool and knave-proof system.  There is not some perfect constitution, some perfect legal code, that is going to get things right once and for all.  Dreaming of a perfect fix is disastrous politically. (Why?  Because it encourages the idea that we just need to do the engineering, then walk away and let the machine function properly.  This is Marx’s delusion about the withering away of the state because only administrative details will persist after communism is installed.  Politics is the perpetual give and take among interested parties. To think it is not perpetual is to cede the field to one’s adversaries.)

Whatever system one devises is going to generate efforts to game it.  Eternal vigilance is always required because knaves are ever present.  A system must define what virtue is, must try its hardest to prevent knavery where possible and punish it when it occurs (as it inevitably will), and revise itself as new problems arise or new capabilities are needed.  The system can aspire to be better than the imperfect humans who implement it, but it should never delude itself that it can transform those humans into angels.  Without virtue any system will fail.  With virtue, perhaps most systems will muddle along.

Tocqueville, in this book, is concerned with the ways the system of the ancient régime actually encouraged, even rewarded, the lack of virtue.  That’s a rich vein of thought—and one applicable, with attention to relevant differences, to our own time.  How are we to understand a society that seems organized to produce vice, particularly selfishness?

One Tocquevillian thought: those who wish to accumulate political power are well served by granting to other citizens the opportunity to accumulate economic power.  A quid pro quo.  We’ll leave you alone in the economic sphere if you let us have our way in the political sphere.  I don’t think that’s what is happening in today’s America–mostly because economic and political power are so closely intertwined–but it is an interesting way to think about liberalism over the long run (i.e. from 1750 to 1980) and, thus, perhaps a way to distinguish liberalism from neo-liberalism (the post 1980 order).