Tocqueville's Other Book: Why Administrative Centralism Doesn't Work

Last week I posted an enthusiastic piece about Alexis de Tocqueville's other book, The Old Regime and the French Revolution. The end of the book looks forward to Volume 2, about the Revolution itself. But Tocqueville died, at 53 from tuberculosis, before writing it.

But never mind, because his Old Regime is a masterpiece. It says that top-down centralized bureaucratic administrative government can't work. Let us rehearse the three reasons why.

The first reason is the one we know as the knowledge problem, after Hayek. In Tocqueville it is illustrated by the insanity of the central government in Paris having to OK the expenditure of funds to repair a church steeple in some tiny village. You just cannot direct the details from the center; there simply isn't enough bandwidth and the bureaucrat in the center just cannot know all the details specific to a problem in a little village way out in la France profonde.

The second reason is the natural tendency of any government to divide and conquer. The last thing the monarch or dictator wants is the squabbling groups and clans to unite against him. The French king did it by handing out privileges and tax exemptions to the nobles with one hand as he took away their powers with the other hand, and he handed out jobs in the bureaucracy to the middle class. Everybody hung on like grim death to their privileges, and everyone hated everyone else for their privileges. So when the French king needed the nation to be united, it wasn't. We can understand why US presidents all talk about "we are all Americans" right after winning a hard-fought election. They all know that the divisions and the enmities of a hard-fought election make it much harder to govern. All of them except Obama.

The third reason is that, when people are drawn into a legislature as representatives of the people, they have to compromise to get things done, and they get to know about other peoples' views and problems. So they compromise; so they buy the support of fence-sitters. That's what the social scientists tell us. When you put Americans into a room to solve a problem they will do it by trying to deal with everyone's objections and needs.

Obviously, the way not to do it is the Obama way, of passing Obamacare so we can see what is in it. Of fiddling with immigration law using executive action. Of just telling schools to come up with gender-neutral bathrooms. Never mind whether Obamacare is a good idea, or unlimited immigration, or transgender-friendly bathrooms. Edicts from the top just won't work; they make people mad. The way you do it is by slow and painstaking negotiations by representatives of the people so that, as much as possible, everyone's needs get addressed.

Obviously, if you govern a country through legislatures all the way down from nation to village there is not a lot of stuff you can do, because of the limited bandwidth of all deliberative assemblies. Maybe that is an argument for limited government, rather than an argument for replacing the inefficiency of deliberation with the efficiency of administration.

Even if administration were efficient, which it is not.

Because there is another way of doing things. It is called the market system.

Today Jonah Goldberg has a piece longing for a new constitutional conservatism. No doubt.

But the time to talk about the constitution and the meaning of conservatism is after the election. We are sitting here in the ruins of the previous constitutional conservatism, so it's going to take a while to get it going again.

And really, there was nothing wrong with the old constitutional conservatism except for one thing. We conservatives thought, after Reagan, that we had won the argument for limited government and low taxes and deregulation. But we were wrong. Barack Obama represents a strong current in the educated elite of this country, and he and it really believes in its divide-and-rule identity politics, and really thinks that the way to govern is through national edicts on everything from sexual conduct in universities to bathroom policy in schools.

Obama and the left are wrong, but we are in a mess, and it will take a generation to build a conservatism to sweep it away.

We should have realized that you never win the argument, not forever. We conservatives, we bourgeois, are people that are not that interested in power. But there is always a new generation coming up that is very interested in power.

The trouble is that it takes power to push back against the devotees of power, so it takes a while for the limited-power people to get woken from their slumber and get on the job of pushing back against the latest movement of power worship.

And you have to keep up the rhetoric for freedom, for accepting the decisions of the market, for limited government, and you have to keep it up every day, forever.

Tocqueville's Other Book: The Old Regime Before the French Revolution

I finally got to the end of Deirdre McCloskey's overmannered Bourgeois Equality, and then lightning struck. I just happened to stumble over a copy of Alexis de Tocqueville's The Old Regime and the French Revolution in the remainder stacks at HalfPriceBooks. For $1.00. Plus tax.

OMG.

Tocqueville argues that the French Revolution changed nothing in France.

Really. The most famous event in European history and it changed nothing? Surely you are joking, Mr. T.

Here is his argument in two lines:

1. Before the Revolution, France was a centralized top-down administrative monarchy. 

2. After the Revolution, France was a centralized top-down administrative monarchy/republic, whatever.

Yes, but what about them aristos, the nasty chaps that got sliced up by Madame Guillotine unless they were saved by Baroness Orczy's Scarlet Pumpernickel?

Good point. But the nobility under the ancien régime was no longer a feudal aristocracy. Its power had been sapping away for centuries. In the years before the Revolution France was governed by the Royal Council, le Conseil du roi, and the council was headed by a Controller-General. The Controller-General governed France through Intendants in each généralité, all across France.

France used to have authentic popular governing institutions. But the absolute monarchy, operating
through the Royal Council, slowly sapped away all the popular and feudal institutions, replacing them with a pure bureaucratic organization through which everything in France, from the fall of a sparrow to the conduct of war, was controlled by the center in Paris.

By the time of the revolution the nobility had no power, but it did have privileges, and especially exemptions from taxation. So everyone hated the aristos, because of their privileges. The middle class hated the stuck-up aristocrats, but they moved heaven and earth to buy some official position, which provided them with an income and an exemption from taxes.

What about the workers? Well, in 1789 we are talking about farmers, and they mostly owned their own farms because the aristocracy had been selling their land off for a while and the peasants were buying. The peasants, of course, hated the fact that they were the ones stuck with the short straw, paying the taxes and supplying the cannon fodder for the militia. So they hated the middle class.

Everyone hated everyone else and they were ready in the old Paris brickyard, you might say, to settle scores with a vengeance once the starter bellowed: gentlemen, start your engines.

But did these warring tribes demand independence from the center? Not a bit of it. Tocqueville writes about various schemes for improvement and reform.

The ends proposed by the reformers varied greatly, but the means were always the same. They wished to make use of the central power, as it stood, for shattering the whole social structure and rebuilding it on lines that seemed to them desirable.

Everyone looked to a strong central government to solve their problems.

The comparison with our own times is chilling. Tocqueville argues that in the old feudal times people got on pretty well. There were parlements and the Estates worked together, middle class and nobility, to solve problems. People up and down the social scale had the power and they used it sensibly to work out their differences. The towns were mostly self-governing, and so they governed themselves.

But by the time of the revolution nobody had any power except what they could wheedle from the Intendants and their subdelegates. So they retreated from politics and governance and argued about precedence. The guild of lawyers demanded precedence over the plumbers, and so on. And they schemed to win privileges and exemptions and government jobs.

By the time of the revolution, according to Tocqueville, France was already pretty equal: there was not much to tell between a noble and a bourgeois: they walked and talked and thought the same. But they imagined enormous differences in blood and in the quarterings on their escutcheons.

Enough said for now. Here is the heading for Chapter Ten, next up.

How the suppression of political freedom and the barriers set up between classes brought on most of the diseases to which the old regime succumbed.

Hello liberals! How is that divide-and-conquer race, class, and gender politics doing for you today?

Because I wonder. I wonder if one day your divisive politics might throw up a man on a white horse promising to Make America Great Again.

Click here for Part II of Tocqueville's Other Book.