Tocqueville and public choice

It is a remarkable fact that the first great exploration of mass democracy proceeded from a method so congenial to modern public choice. It is also a fact from which members of that school may take not only considerable satisfaction but valuable instruction as they seek to integrate their scholarly interests and impressive analytic skills with a compelling philosophical perspective. However profond his empirical work, Tocqueville's treatment of some topics is less thorough and rigorous than that found in selected contemporary studies. Economists, for example, would rightly observe that he, like Smith, lacked the formal proofs of welfare economics and the techniques of marginal analysis (even while his intuitions into those modern schemes are almost invariably correct, and he was entirely aware of most aspects of strategic behavior dealt with today in public choice). But when one considers the comprehensive nature of his descriptive/analytic work, revealing critical associations of beliefs, rules and incentives among all major social realms, it can be said confidently that his general equilibrium analysis, including the sources of instability he identified, remains unsurpassed in the tradition in which he wrote. Still, it would be wrong to read Tocqueville primarily for reasons of technical enlightenment. His relevance for public choice is much greater: in providing for that field both a trenchant framework of positive theory and an abiding philosophical justification, he offers a unified model in which the undertakings proposed by Buchanan are given concrete expression. This brief exegesis, of course, identifies only a few of the manifold subjects raised in Tocqueville's demiurgic treatise that are of interest to public choice; his work addresses many other issues of equal and pressing relevance, including a piercing analysis of democracy under the new system of property rights he realized would emerge with industrialization, a matter that deserves its own extended discussion. In the 1930s there was, upon its centenary, a resurgence of scholarly interest in Democracy and its prophecies, and there was some dispute as to whether Tocqueville's more somber warnings had been, or were about to be, realized. Fifty years of additional experience have not been altogether comforting. Is it not now the case that governmental size, concentration and power have grown beyond recognition; that every want has its power base and political voice; and that acquiescent and demagogic politicans seek, in the end unsucccessfully, to accommodate every voter, place-hunter, and political association? If so, we may still agree that the denouement is not yet. The plot must still be clarified. Tocqueville's rational-choice analytics point to the eventual collapse of democracy and its uneasy partner, liberty, as mobilized but insatiable populations grow weary and impatient with unappeased wants. Economic inefficiency, while important, is not the greatest cost imposed by such tendencies. Liberty itself would be lost, and with it the individual's opportunity to develop freely his character and virtue. One cannot discount the tone of doubt on this score that runs through Democracy, but there is an important counterpoint. Tocqueville neither mourned an aristocracy grown decadent nor feared the democratic future; rather, he cautioned that history was choice — he detested nothing more than the materialistic determinism fashionable among the Ideologues of his day. He therefore believed that democracy, while irresistible in its attraction, could possibly, by responsible choice, be channeled, disciplined and made compatible with liberty if enlightened self-interests should triumph over unenlightened ones. Tocqueville's own life was lived in harmony with just that principle, which gave to it a noble irony. Whatever other aspects of human nature he may have emphasized in his empirical work, he was himself a disinterested seeker after liberty and justice. No doubt it was to pay homage to such rare qualities that Nassau William Senior made his long and melancholy trek in 1859 to Tocqueville's grave, upon which he laid a wreath of immortelles.