More on de Tocqueville

I am continually amazed as to the intellectual shallowness of some of our academics. Now I used to be one but upon entering business I had to deal with facts, for not dealing with them resulted in disaster. The same is the case in medicine. You cannot ignore sepsis, it will kill the patient, often despite your best efforts. But shallowness is unforgivable, and especially to justify a political point.

Now from Schleifer's work on de Tocqueville we have on p. 315 the following:

Tocqueville also realized that, at the same time, the suffocating ef­fects of a centralized and omnipresent government in turn further discouraged any private efforts. If unchecked, this relentless cycle of reinforcement would ultimately end in total "individual servitude,"[1] the hallmark of the New Despotism. So the final portion of his book would serve primarily to express his concern for the survival of independance individuelle in democratic times[2]. "To lay down exten­sive but distinct and settled limits to the action of the government; to confer certain rights on private persons, and to secure to them the undisputed enjoyment of those rights; to enable individual man to maintain whatever independence, strength, and original power he still possesses; to raise him by the side of society at large, and uphold him in that position; these appear to me the main objects of legisla­tors in the ages upon which we are now entering."

 ^{Now this is clear and unambiguous. The New Despotism is the result of the suffocating effects of a centralized government, as we all too often see in France, and now in this country as well. We fear losing our citizenship and becoming subjects, for that is the way we are often treated by Washington.}

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[1] Democracy (Mayer), pp. 676, 679.

[2] Tocqueville frequently used independance individuelle and similar terms; see es­pecially ibid., pp. 679, 681, 688, 691-92, 695-96, 699-700,701-2, 703-4.