Autor: Mansfield, Harvey C.

Buch: Tocqueville

Titel: Tocqueville

Stichwort: Tocqueville; Township, Geschworenengericht: Schule für Freiheit; Gleichheit - Gehorsam (Nützlichkeit)

Kurzinhalt: In aristocracy, individuals are fixed in a hierarchy between those on whom they depend and those who depend on them. Hardly “individuals,” they have their associations supplied for them. But in democracy ...

Textausschnitt: The township

21a Free individuals by themselves are weak, and Tocqueville must explain how they become strong, so that democratic equality results in strengthening them rather than encouraging their envy. What strengthens individuals is association—a key topic in Tocqueville that he approaches through his discussion of the New England township. In aristocracy, individuals are fixed in a hierarchy between those on whom they depend and those who depend on them. Hardly “individuals,” they have their associations supplied for them. But in democracy, men are free—or deprived of—these bonds and must make their associations for themselves. To do this they have a natural disposition to associate with other men at their disposal, second only to their self-love—again a contrast to the “state of nature” that conceives individuals to be at war. (Fs)

21b Township is both natural and fragile. It is “so much in nature that everywhere men are gathered, a township forms by itself,” yet among civilized nations it is found only in America. The reason is that township government is like a “primary school” of freedom, immature and inexpert, which higher authorities are always tempted to interfere with and set right. Only America has the wisdom, or the good luck that Tocqueville has the wisdom to point out, to keep the township intact. Tocqueville calls it a form of government because it is orderly, open to view and public; it is government neither hidden nor remote but in broad daylight. The township, to be sure, is authorized by the state governments to which Tocqueville turns next, but he begins his analysis of democracy as a form of government from the bottom up, where it is most spontaneous. (Fs)

22a The dogma of the sovereignty of the people says that each individual is “as enlightened, as virtuous, as strong” as anyone else. Yet if he is to accomplish anything beyond his own individual powers, he must associate with others; and if he associates, he must obey those who have been set in charge. Tocqueville uses the English word “selectmen” for those in charge of a township; if he had said it in French, he might have called them the elite. Now since each individual is declared equal in capacity to any other person, why should he obey? He obeys not because he is inferior but because it is useful to obey. He swallows his pride for the sake of accomplishing something, such as the building of a road, that he cannot do by himself. And at the end he still has his pride, the pride of accomplishment together with the pleasure of being sociable. He has learned, as if in primary school, that he can obey and still be free. In the introduction to Democracy in America, Tocqueville had said that democracy in Europe has been “abandoned to its savage instincts”; here in the American township, it thrives while enjoying the legitimacy it lacks there. (Fs)

22b In the township America teaches itself how to live in freedom, and with his analysis Tocqueville teaches America what it is doing. He admits that township government is not found everywhere in America, and he no doubt exaggerates its virtues, urging them with his praise. If the sovereignty of the people worked from the top down instead of from the bottom up, as in France, it would be imposed and would not be felt. Township government, with many elected offices, satisfies many petty ambitions and attaches citizens to their government as their own. It habituates them to the forms of government, “forms without which freedom proceeds only through revolutions.” Democracy thrives through elections, and, Tocqueville says, it is not that America has elections because it is prosperous, but it is prosperous because it has elections. (Fs)

23a Another form that teaches self-government to Americans is the jury, “a school, free of charge and always open, where each juror comes to be instructed in his rights.” In England the jury of one’s peers was an aristocratic institution, but in America it is democratized. It teaches citizens how to judge, which means how to execute general laws, of the kind democratic legislatures are eager to pass, in particular circumstances where equity may require some adjustment. It teaches “each man not to recoil from responsibility for his own acts”—a manly political virtue, he says. Tocqueville endows the jury with great power. It is the “most energetic means of making the people reign”—perhaps a deliberate exaggeration to suit his strategy of advising or urging in the guise of praising. And what makes the people reign “is also the most efficacious means of teaching them to reign.” In America, a free people learns by doing, not by consulting a theory before acting. (Fs)

23b In general, judging moderates the sovereignty of the people, showing them that their sovereignty has limits, that it must be expressed in laws, and that even good laws, when executed, may be too harsh. At the same time the election of judges in American states reveals that in elections generally the people have an arbitrary power of dismissal that cannot be fully justified or remedied. However controlled and moderated the people’s sovereignty may be, it retains an element of the irrational. The sovereignty of the people may be finally no more rational than that of a monarch; both have their whims. Freedom cannot be made altogether reasonable, and free citizens who see their party and their candidates lose must learn to accept the people’s decision with equanimity. (Fs)

23c In view of the political advantages of the township and the jury, Tocqueville makes a distinction concerning centralization in government that is still often cited. Centralization of the government is good if it joins together the force of common interests, but centralized administration in executing government enervates people who submit to it because, by demanding uniformity, it tends to diminish “the spirit of the city” in them, the practice of self-government combined with resistance to outsiders reflected in the local freedom of the township and the jury. He admits that centralized administration may be more efficient, but it feeds on itself, becoming ever more invasive and clumsy, oblivious to the harm it does when it takes administration out of the hands of the people, spurning their free cooperation, and keeps it in bureaucrats who direct it from the center. France is the epitome of this error, as the administration of the monarchy by such ministers as Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin set a bad example that was followed by the French Revolution. The United States, however, with its federalism, kept local administration alive and followed the good example of administrative decentralization in England—another instance of an institution adapted from aristocracy and democratized. (Fs)

24a The system of federalism in America is the union established under the Constitution, and Tocqueville turns from the township, described as a natural and spontaneous form, and from the individual states, also called natural, like a father’s authority, to the union, called a “work of art.” He delivers an encomium on the constitutional founding of 1787-89, praising the Americans as a “great people warned by its legislators” of a crisis, looking upon itself for a period of two years, sounding the depth of the ill, finding the remedy at leisure, and submitting to it “without its costing humanity one tear or drop of blood.” This achievement was “new in the history of societies.” In keeping with the principle of the sovereignty of the people, Tocqueville first gives the credit for it to the American people, later praising the founders and the Federalist party for leading the way. He calls them “the finest minds and noblest characters that had ever appeared in the New World.” He seems to suggest that sovereignty is sometimes best shown not in assertiveness but in patience and deference to those with superior virtue. (Fs)