Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and the Political Psychology of the Modern Republic

In earlier posts – here, here, and here – I drew attention to the pre-eminence of Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu in and for a time after the eighteenth century, and I suggested that at least two of the reasons for his pre-eminence are still pertinent today. There is at least one other such reason, and it, too, deserves careful consideration.

In The Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu pays exceedingly close attention to the political psychology regnant within the various forms of government that he examines. Republics have as their psychological principle, he tells us, virtue or love of the fatherland and its laws; and, when this fails, they collapse. As we have just seen, monarchies have as their principle the love of honor; and, when monarchs make holding public office degrading and demeaning, they subvert their own authority. And by the same token, despotisms have as their principle fear, and they are corrupt through and through. In The Spirit of Laws, all of this is made crystal clear.

But when it comes time for Montesquieu to specify the principle or passion that sets in motion “the republic concealed as a monarchy” that he discovered when he visited England, he is ostentatiously silent. Eventually, however, in oblique fashion, he will tiptoe around the question.

In writing of England, he observes that “this nation” is “always inflamed” and that “it is more easily conducted by its passions than by reason, which never produces any great effects on the minds of men.” And in speaking of the separation of powers and of the distinct functions assigned the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary, he argues that when, “by the necessary motion of things, they are constrained to move, they are forced to move in concert.” One cannot say of the English constitution what Montesquieu says of despotism: that it “jumps up, so to speak, before our eyes”; that “it is uniform throughout”; that “the passions alone” – above all, the human inclination to give way to fear – “are necessary for its establishment.” The modern republic is, after all, “a masterpiece of legislation,” a product of chance and prudent artifice. One can say of it, instead, what he says of monarchy: that, in it, “policy makes great things happen with as little of virtue as it can” and that, “just as in the most beautiful machines, art also employs as little of movement, of forces, of wheels as is possible. The state subsists independently of love of the fatherland, of desire for true glory, of self-renunciation, of the sacrifice of one’s dearest interests, & of all those heroic virtues which we find in the ancients & know only from hearing them spoken of.” Moreover, one can say that, once a modern republic is instituted, “the human passions that set it in motion” are “alone” necessary to sustain it – and that the ruling passion that does so is closely akin to the very passion that is responsible for the “establishment” of despotism. This helps explain, among other things, the tenor of Montesquieu’s description of the contribution made by England’s “laws” in forming “the mores, the manners, & the character” of the English “nation,” as we shall soon see.

One consequence of the English form of government’s open pursuit of liberty is that “all the passions there are free: hatred, envy, jealousy, the ardor to enrich & distinguish oneself appear to their full extent; & if things were otherwise, the state would be like a man struck down by a malady who has no passions because he has no strength (forces).” In a sense, the English citizen is unaccommodated man: like the individual trapped within the state of nature, he is “always independent.” He therefore follows “his caprices & his fantasies”; he and his countrymen are inclined “not to care to please anyone,” and so “they abandon themselves to their own humors.” Frequently, they even switch parties and drop one set of friends to take up another, having forgotten “the laws of love & those of hatred.”

Precisely because the laws make no distinctions among men, each Englishman “regards himself as a monarch; & men, in that nation,” are, in a sense, “confederates rather than fellow citizens.” The fact that “no citizen ends up fearing another” gives the Englishman a king-like “independence” that makes the English as a nation “proud.” But, at the same time, “living,” as they do “much among themselves” in a state of “retirement” or “retreat,” they “often find themselves in the midst of those whom they do not know.” This renders them “timid,” like those men in the state of nature truly graced with independence, but the recognition of “reciprocal fright” does not have on them the effect that it has on men in their natural state: it does not cause them to draw near, to take “pleasure” in the approach of “an animal” of their “own sort,” and to become sociable. They are similarly immune to “the charm” of sexual “difference” and to “the natural appeal” which draws women and men to one another even in that aboriginal state. Instead of friendliness and longing, “one sees in” the “eyes” of these Englishmen, “the better part of the time, a strange mixture of ill-mannered shame & pride.” Their “character” as a “nation” most clearly appears in the products of their minds – which reveal them as “people collected within themselves” who are inclined to “think each entirely on his own.” In short, Montesquieu’s Englishman is very much alone.

That so solitary a man should have an “uneasy spirit (esprit inquiet)” stands to reason. Nor is it surprising that, unprompted by genuine peril or even by false alarm, he should nonetheless “fear the escape of a good” that he “feels,” that he “hardly knows,” and that “can be hidden from us,” and that this “fear” should “always magnify objects” and render him “uneasy (inquiet) in his situation” and inclined to “believe” that he is “in danger even in those moments when” he is “most secure.” The liberation of the passions does not give rise to joy. “Political liberty in its relation with the constitution,” what we call the rule of law, may well be “established” for the English “by their laws,” but this does not mean that they “actually enjoy” what Montesquieu calls “political liberty in its relation with the citizen” – for the latter is constituted by “that tranquility of mind which comes from the opinion that each has of his security,” and the English are anything but tranquil of mind.

“Uneasiness (inquiétude)” without “a certain object” would appear to be the Englishman’s normal state of mind. He is rarely given reason to fear another citizen: fear is not deployed to secure his obedience as it is in a despotism. But he is anxious and fearful nonetheless. Moreover, in such a country, “the majority of those who possess intelligence & wit would be tormented by that very esprit: in the disdain or disgust” that they would feel with regard “to all things, they would be unhappy with so many reasons not to be so.”

You will not find a similar analysis of the state of mind of liberal democratic man in The Federalist or elsewhere in the writing of the American Founding Fathers. This is not a question that they raised. As, however, I have suggested in Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty and argued in detail  in Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, one will find it in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose analysis of the travails of life in bourgeois society owes a great deal to Montesquieu; and one will find it as well in Alexis de Tocqueville, who argues that within democracies equality both liberates ambition by removing the obstacles that prevent men of ignoble birth and real ability from rising above their condition and frustrates ambition by submerging the ambitious in a vast crowd from which it is hard, if not impossible, to escape.

One early, Anglo-Irish reader of Montesquieu noticed the critical undertone within the Frenchman’s eulogy of the English constitution and the way of life to which it gave rise, and he wrote to Montesquieu to ask whether he thought English liberty in danger. Montesquieu wrote back that the last breath of freedom in Europe would be breathed by an Englishman. But, in his notebooks, he sketched out a more complex answer, suggesting that English liberty depends upon the predominance within England of what we would now call private enterprise. He acknowledges the presence of corruption in the political sphere, but he was struck by the fact that the English people were not themselves corrupt, and he evidenced confidence in their ability from time to time to throw the rascals out. As long as the government left private entrepreneurs to their own devices, and patronage gave the politicians very little leverage over ordinary citizens, Montesquieu contended, liberty was safe.

In The Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu had sketched an analysis of English politics suggesting that the separation of powers – in particular, the separation between the executive and the legislative power – had the effect of transforming English inquiétude into something less amorphous, something more like a political principle or a passion capable of setting the polity in motion – and this principle was what English Whigs called jealousy, which is to say: an unreasoning but not unreasonable suspicion of politicians, a wariness regarding their intentions, an attentiveness to the tyrannical impulse all too often present in the ambitious under the cover of idealism. Even when this jealousy was excessive, as it often was, Montesquieu thought, it was favorable to liberty because it encouraged officeholders to mind their manners and conduct themselves in office in an honorable fashion.

I know of no passage in the writings of those who founded or lived in the early American republic suggesting reflection regarding Montesquieu’s analysis of the political psychology of liberal democratic man. But there is a great deal of discussion of jealousy in the writings of the Anti-Federalists and the Federalists alike, and it is generally, but not universally, regarded as a posture proper to the citizen in such a polity.

Moreover, in the 1790s, after the American republic was established, some of those quite deeply involved in the Founding came to have misgivings. It was in response to the legislative program proposed by George Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton that James Madison began thinking about the prospect we now face – “a consolidation of the States into one government” – and the dire consequences that might be attendant on such an eventuality. First, he argued, the “incompetency of one Legislature to regulate all the various objects belonging to the local governments, would evidently force a transfer of many of” those objects “to the executive department.” Then, he contended that, if the state and local governments were made subject to the federal government, the sheer size of the country “would prevent that [popular] control” on the federal Congress, “which is essential to a faithful discharge of its trust, [since] neither the voice nor the sense of ten or twenty millions of people, spread through so many latitudes as are comprehended within the United States, could ever be combined or called into effect, if deprived of those local organs, through which both can now be conveyed.” In such circumstances, Madison warned, “the impossibility of acting together, might be succeeded by the inefficacy of partial expressions of the public mind, and this at length, by a universal silence and insensibility, leaving the whole government to that self directed course, which, it must be owned, is the natural propensity of every government.”

In short, Madison revisited Montesquieu’s argument concerning republics and the extent of territory suitable to them. And, at a time when the territory of the United States was much smaller than it is now, and the population was barely more than one-fifteenth of what it is now, he began to worry that the extent of territory encompassed by the Union and the size of its population might be too great. He was, moreover, virtually certain that, if the federal government were allowed to encroach on the prerogatives of the states and the localities, as he believed Hamilton intended, despotism of one sort or another would be the result.

Tocqueville shared these concerns, and he worried that, in the absence of vigorous local government as a training ground for civic agency, the inquiétude, the sense of uneasiness natural to liberal democratic man, would turn into an abject, desperate search for security that would transforms citizens into subjects and self-reliant women and men into wards of the administrative state. That, as I argued in detail in Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, is what we see today. To an ever-increasing degree, our compatriots are subject to what Tocqueville described as “an immense, tutelary power, which takes sole charge of assuring their enjoyment and of watching over their fate” As he predicted, this power is “absolute, attentive to detail, regular, provident, and gentle,” and it “works willingly for their happiness, but it wishes to be the only agent and the sole arbiter of that happiness. It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their needs, guides them in their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their testaments, divides their inheritances.” It is entirely proper to ask, as he asked, whether it can “relieve them entirely of the trouble of thinking and of the effort associated with living.” For such is evidently its aim.

Moreover, “after having taken each individual in this fashion by turns into its powerful hands, and after having kneaded him in accord with its desires, the sovereign

extends its arms about the society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of petty regulations – complicated, minute, and uniform – through which even the most original minds and the most vigorous souls know not how to make their way past the crowd and emerge into the light of day. It does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them; rarely does it force one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting on one’s own; it does not destroy; it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it gets in the way, it curtails, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Tocqueville coined a new phrase to describe this form of government. He called it soft despotism. The new and unprecedented “species of servitude” that Tocqueville had in mind was, as he later observed, “regulated, gentle or soft, and favorable to peace,” and he suspected that it could be “combined more easily” than men were inclined to imagine “with some of the external forms of liberty.” He even suggests “that it would be possible for it to be established in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people.” In this fashion – with the institution of a “unitary, tutelary, all-powerful” government “elected by the citizens” at regular intervals – one might actually satisfy the two contradictory impulses found among his contemporaries: the felt “need for guidance, and the longing to remain free.” What this would involve, Tocqueville explains, is a “species of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people,” a corrupt bargain between the ghost of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and that of his erstwhile admirer Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, in which the political doctrine of the former is deployed rhetorically for the purpose of legitimizing a law-abiding, steady, reliable despotism on the model of pre-modern China – of the very sort that was espoused in full knowledge of what they were embracing by Turgot’s mentors among the Physiocrats. Under such an arrangement, Tocqueville remarked, pointedly paraphrasing what Rousseau had once said of the English, “the citizens emerge for a moment from dependence for the purpose of indicating their masters and then re-enter,” without further ado, “their former state. They console themselves for being in tutelage with the thought that they have chosen the tutors themselves,” and “they think that they have sufficiently guaranteed the liberty of the individual when they have delivered it to the national power.” Look in the mirror, and this is what you will see.