Democracy in America: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Tocqueville notes how strange it is for a European to observe the absence of “Administration” in America. While Europeans maintain authority by limiting rights, Americans distribute authority among many different hands—disseminating rather than destroying it (since indeed, a love of order and law does characterize the American people). The idea is that the community will be at once regulated and free: the power exists, even while its representative cannot be pinpointed.

Tocqueville distinguishes between centralized government, which concentrates common interests like foreign relations or general laws, and centralized administration, which concentrates local interests into one place. Together, they have enormous power, but they need not both be present: English centralized government, for instance, is powerful, but its administration has never been centralized. Tocqueville argues that centralized government is necessary for a nation to prosper, but that centralized administration only sucks away local spirit and “enervates” nations.

The United States thus benefits from its decentralized administration. There is a single legislature in each state and concentration of national affairs in the capital, but power in local affairs is divided. Sometimes this works slowly and inefficiently. In New England, for instance, the town assessor decides on tax rates, the town collector receives them, and the town treasurer sends the amount to the public treasury.

While Tocqueville is confident that such inefficiency can be reformed without a new system, he argues that the total decentralization of administration goes too far in America. Still, he also insists that centralized administration is not the answer, since no one central power can be adept enough to embrace all the details of a great nation’s life. Sometimes Tocqueville has observed weaknesses in the lack of uniform regulations that control everyone’s conduct in France, such as in certain examples of social neglect, but he also has witnessed the participation of many in the “common weal” (or commonwealth), for instance, building schools and churches or repairing roads on their own.

Tocqueville also argues that an absolute authority over people’s lives prevents them from feeling a stake in the affairs of their country or even town. If the country ever needs them, they will hardly be eager to rise up to defend it. He uses the example of the Turks, who only rose up to defend their nation as a defense of Islam. Now that their faith is weakening, there’s only despotism, not true spirit, that remains. Laws are thus necessary to reawaken the patriotic impulse. Indeed, Tocqueville most admires the political rather than the administrative effects of decentralization in America—the ability of citizens to keep their country’s interests in view everywhere.

Americans obey not other men but justice and law. They also are eager to embark on private undertakings, which might fail more than government initiatives, but the sum total of all personal undertakings exceeds anything the government could do on its own. Tocqueville takes one example of the success of decentralized administration: while there is no criminal police on the same level as in France, no passports, and no long examinations, America is notable for its ability to punish almost every crime—because the people rise up together in the interest of finding and judging the criminal, who is considered an actual enemy of the people.

Provincial institutions are particularly necessary in a democracy, Tocqueville argues, since without them there is no security against the excesses of central power. Nonetheless, democracies are also most in danger of yielding to central power, in part because centralized government tends to want to spread into central administration as well (as happened during the French Revolution, which was against both the king and provincial institutions, and thus democratized and centralized at the same time—leading to a new kind of tyranny). Those countries that deny the utility of provincial institutions are those where they least exist.