LIBSRALISM VERSUS DBMOGRAGY: MILL, DE TOCQUEVILLE, ACTON

The French Revolutoon, however historians may wrangie over its correct intepreatitlon, remains at all events stihhornly revolution ary. After the "breaking of the ice-"barroers in 1789 the of the neat century and more can hardly help appearing as a stppB^dons flood whriling on in a confusion of change. The metaphor may conceal a further truthj for the mases of material which had piled up against the resisting ice "by 1789 - the great critical ideas of the Enlightenment and so on - were oerhaps more an indication that the "barrier was there than the source of its dissolution. Certaonly when the flood took command majsy of those ideas were swept to strange destinations at spgeds that sometimes alarmed their supporters. This is one way of expressing the theme of this paper. Mill, de Tocqueville, and Acton -- the three witers I have selected to illustarate a Vroader theme - might without too much fantasy "be repr esented as the desperate navigators of logs carried along "by the heedless rush of tur"bulent water. They all felt that the li"beral values they upheld were in some sense threatened "by tye advance of .

This is not meant to suggest that the views of three such different men were identical. This could hardly "be the case. The contrsats are too sharp.iKXXKen Mill, the supreme Victorian intellectual himself in some sense a product of a rising middle class whose standards he largely despised, is a very different figure from de Tocqueville the Norman aristocrat whose father had narrov/ly escaoed the revolutionary Terror and who was himself syfficiently loyal to the Bouj'hons to feel some conscientious qualms over taking the oath of -2-

allegiance to Louis-Philippe» And hoth in their different ways "belong to worlds other than that manifoM, "brilliant, almost exotic world of eoamopolitanX aritocracy wMch gave "birth to the unclassifia'ble figure of Acton. Yet despite their differences the three were brought at times close enough together in their thought• Mill and de Tocpuebille, near-contemporaries, discovered their affinities in actual acquantanceship and correspondence® Acton, a generation younger, recognised in de Tocqueville one of the leading political thinkers of the century and placed Mill (with Bentham, among the "fathers of the liberal church" —a church ¥/hose essential importance for him •-ill he revealed in the sequel. The affinity which united theBi despite their different origins and outlook sprang from a common fean —the fea? that human freedom, which was to all three the supreme value, was menaced hy an in creasingly democratic society.

It is important at this stage to emphasise two points• First, the genuineness of the which united the three writers v/e are concerned v/ith. No one can read their worlds in extenso and suppose seriously for a moment that their preoccupation v.'ith freedom is a mere mask for conservatism or reaction. And the second point is connected v/ith the first, //hatever their fears all three T/ere far too realistic to think in terms of holding back or turning back the tide. Each in his own way came to terms with the fact that wxs demcracy had increased, was increasing, and could not be diminished, ii'/hat they hoped and at times believed v/as that the democratic evolution of society could be so directed and tempered as to preserve the essentials of liberty. But obvlousjy to understand this belief we must first understand more clearly the fear it helped to offset. -3-

y/e may "begin with Mill "because, though slightly younger than de Tocqueville, he came earlier to grips with the pro"bleiii v/e are concerned with. Moreover he came to grips with it in an acuter form, i^erhaps, thB.n eltlier

To the extent that these principles were abandoned or at least greatly modified in Mill's later thought, the change owed much to the influence of de Tocqueville. The appearance of the first part of De la dSmocratie en Amerique in 1835 marked an epoch in Mill's political thinking. More than this, it was an epoch in 19th. century thinking about democracy in general. Welcomed by con servative critics of democracy who chode to ignore the many positive aspects of de Tocqueville's assessment, it could not be ignored by liberals and radicals. Now de Tocqueville himself was a liberal; but a liberal who proclaimed the need, in a new age, for a new liberalism. He himself had fused with the arictocratic values of his inheritance a belief in the somewhat abstract constitutional principles of the Premch liberals of the Restoration. What he added above all was a striking and far-reaching awareness of just how new the new age was. So penetrating was his vision that he even foresaw, in a famous passage,

the shift in world power away from Europe to Russia on the one side and America on the other. As for America, not only ¥;as he

the first European writer to devote to it all the resources of a first-class mind deployed in a largescale -work On his own avowal, he saw in America more than AmericaX alone. He saw in it the image of democracy, and thecefore the dmage of Europe's inevitable fut^e. -5-

De Tocqueville was never an analytically precise writer, and some of his major concepts have in some measure t he taken on trust. Even democracy is a term of some ambiguity in his writing, seeming at times to mean primarily a political system at others mainly a social tendency towards "equality of conditions"• No doubt de Tocqueville saw - and perhaps rightly saw - these two things as sides of the same medil. For him, at all events, the supremely important thing about American and European history from the end of the I8th century is the unfolding of a society in v/hich the broad mass of the people advance to social, economic, and political power over the ruined barriers of ancient hierarchies• America showed him such the vigour, the enterprise, the dynamic force of xsk a society; but it seemed to him to reveal also the great peril that threatened

Europe even more than America in a democratic age - the tyranny of the majority. De Tocqueville believed he saw in America a paradoxi cal combination of individualism with the lack of original individuality, of freedom with an extraordinary conformity to majority-determined norms: he believed he saw the dead hand of mediocrity threatening, in a democratic order of society, all the highest values of civilisation.

Above all, of course, the tyranny of the ma jority, like all tyrannies threatened the liberty of individuals. Here again we exact signification have a term whose in de Tocqueville *s thought is not always wholly clear • Negatively it means the absence of arbitrary restraint - it means "speaking, acting and breathing withoit restraint, under no master but God and the law"• For de Tocqueville as for Acton after him and Montesquieti hefore "Un limited power is in itself a "bad and dmgerous thing" • At the same time there are positive as well as "begative conditions for liberty in de Tocqueville 's understanding of it - "liberty cannot be established withoit morality, not morality without faith"j "Bhe safeguard of morality is religion, and morality is the best safe guard of law and the surest plddge of freedom". De Tocqueville's own religious position was not constant and is not always clear and explicit; but one reason why he felt freedom to be threatened even more gravely by the European democracy of the future than it was by the American democracy of the I83O*s WSM. may perhaps have been the pervasively religious cast of somuch American life contrasted with A Europe where traditional religion had hardly recovered from the blows of the Revolution.

However this may be, there was in fact another reason for de Tocqueville* heightened anxiety when he turned his perspective glass upon the European present and future. In America there were powerful institutional safeguards against the unlimited triumph of majority power. The federal s trueJo? e of the political system - in which de Tocqeville saw the states as so much the preponderant element that his main reservation in prophesying future greatness ofr

America was doubt as to the capavity of the Union to survive the centrigugal forces within it - federalism was one such safeguard. More generally there was the tendency in the American syetm towards the division and even the fragmentation of power. De

Tocqueville was greatly - pergaps too greatly - impressed by the direct democracy of the town meetings• American critics -7- have not "been slow to point out that, although it was the America of that de Tocqueville visited, he shows little awareness of the Jacksonian assertions of presidential power as a factor offsetting the centrifugal tendencies he so strongly stressed, for us the important point here is the contrast de TocQueville sensed - and undouhtdelj correctly - between the substantiall decentralised United States and the European states of his Mme, above all his own native France.

When de T pueville in the retirement of his last years turned to the cr mtical phase in his own country's history, he produced what, for all its incompleteness, remains one of the outstanding historical works of the 19th century. But Be I'Anfeien Regime et la Revolution is more than a brilliant analysis of some of the forces making for the upheaval of 1789. It is a vehicle at the same time for some of de Toculyill^s profoundest political reflections, reflections which reveal some of the deepest roots of his p ssimism about the democratic future. Reduced to bare essentials,which could be no more than a travesty of we were consid ring the book as historiography, the theme of de Tocque- ville's analysis is that the Revolition , at least in certain vitally important respects, was not a new departure in a different direction, but rather the drastic acceleration of processes which had long antecedents in the French past. Above all this is true of the administrative centraliaation which de Tocqueville sees as the most important political legacy of the Revolution. The Revolution rapidly completed what centuries of monarchical absolut ism had been abo4t - the cretion of a powerful, highly organised -»8— central power* Built upon the ruin of the intermediate orders in the old constitution and of the institutions of prorihcial self-administration, this central machine, resolutely wielded can prevent the emergence of any new intermediate powers as coxinterpoises to its own preponderance. And with the power of revolutionary democracy behind it the machine will not lie idle.

Democracy in Europe for de Tocqueville meant all the mass power and egalitarian vigour of democracy in America armed with something Americam democracy had never had - a truly sovereign unified power.

Yet, altgough de Tocpueville's analysis of the old regime and its revolutionary transformation rrpresented the resumption of themes he had handled twenty years eralier in the article on

"France before the Revolution" v/hich he ?n»ote for Mill's London and.

"Viestminster Review, it v/ould be wrong to read back into the 1830's and iSl+O's the sbdued pessimism of the l850's. The decade after the publication, in l8i}.0, of the s econd part of la d^mocratie en Am^rique, was, for the most part a time of hope and of achievement for de Tocqueville. He launched out upon a political career and even in the unpromising environment of

Parliament \ander the Orleans monarchy made something of a name to add to his brilliant success as an author. He knew gKia-Yi?igwgtHrl:ify that the bourgeois compromise of I83O could not last and he foretold its dOYUJfall. And when the Revolition came in 1814-8 he greeted it with hope not with hostility. His active political career reached its apogee now| for a fe?/ months he played a Eiajor part in the Second ; his Souvenirs remain a major source -9- for the history of that troubled episode. De Tocpueville was» we must again insist, a liberal; ad no liberal could remain indifferent to the fall of the Gitiz en King - least of all a liberal so aristocratic in his tastes and distastes as de Tocgueville.

For John Mill too 181+8 was a moment of importance. He could not recapture the almost violent enthusiasm with which he had we3? corned the July Revolution af I83O. But the dramatic events of 181+8 brought fully back to life those elements in his thought ?/hich had most in syppathy with the people's cause. Mill had indeed recahed the furthest point in his reaction against orthodox radicalism by the early l81+0's. He never again lost the fear of majority tyranny which his own thought, fed and fostered by de Tocquevillel

American observations and reflections, had begun to generate in the years after I832. He never, in his political thinking, ceased to occupy himself with the problem of establishing some safeguarding counterpoise to that ultimate sovereignty of the many which, like de Tocqueville, he accepted as eventually botg inevitable and just. But as the I8h0's advanced, and as the influence - radical and sometimes rather rancorous - of Harriet Taylor, later Mill's wife - grew upon him - so his KKRyXK lettist tendencies, as we might well call them, reasserted themselves. Brougham's attack on the 181+8 revolution evoked an elaborate defence from Mikl, whose thoughts were also tui'ning, for the first time for many years, to the possibility of further parliamentary reform in his own country.

Revolutionary dawns are alv/ays false dawns and it is not surprising that both de Tocqueville and Mill were disappointed -lo in their hopes of l8i+8. For both of them that disappointment may be said to have been personified in the fignre of Louis Napoleon.

Whatver may be the true historical assessment of Napoleon III, the man and his Empire represented the triimph of everything that de Tocqueville the inLblec lual di'laLlcrat and Mill the intellectial aristocrat found most distasteful. And the triumph was in some sense the triumph of democracy. It was direct election vased on universal suffrage that EHaOEgKXXXMXXXHX made the parvenu adventurer

President, Princes-President, Emperor. De Tocqueville, who had striven vainly lxx±kKxx while the constitution of the Second

Republic was in the making to erect safeguards against this kind of development, retired in didillusioned disgust from a political scene where there was no longer a part for him. Mill, if less severely shocked because less directly involved, was at least confirmed in his scepticism about total democracy: it can hardly be accidental that so much of his energy in the I85O's was devoted to the rights of minorities and their protection, the liberty of the individual under the shadow of mass mediocrity.

Mill's Considerations on Representative Government, published m in 1861, two years after de Tocqueville's death, summed up the results of thirty years'often perplexed reflection upon popular The book government. XZKXjE confirmed Mill's rejection of radical policies he had once wholeheartedly supported - voting by ballot, for instance, and shorter parliaments. It confirmed too his conviction that

techinical skill and politicalexperience must be brought fully to -11- l»ear upon politixal problems whose complexity was too great for the uninformed Qudgsent of a mass electorate® But he did not deny the rights of the mass of the people® Given appropiate social conditions he did believe representative government based on uni versal suffrage (truly universal, with women the equals of men in its rights) to be the "ideally best" form of political organisation® But while universal suffrage , once adequate educational standards were reached, was indispensable it -as not, for Mill, sufficient to ensure truly representative government® First, the democracy which was an essential element in his ideal political system must be true democracy, genuinely and fairly representing all the electors, not the false democracy which in effect represeifced only the will of the majority® Thomas Hare's system of personal representation, directed to achieving the due and propertional representation of all significant groups among the electorate, came to Mill almost as a revealed soiition to a problem which had perplexed him for years ® Even so it v/as not ehough® Mill would have been prepared to accept universal suffrage combined with this system as a working solution® But for the ideal solution he wanted something more, more even than the additional safeguards of a professional civil service, a skilled legislative commission to draft measures for parliamentary consideration, and a second chamber mobilising the administrative and cognate experience of those who had proved the ir capacity and will toserve the public• He wanted a representative system in which, given the equal admission of all citizens to the basic right of voting, plural voting would give additional weight to those whose intelligence and educational attainments gave them -12-

SXiOi^aiCM^XHMXXKlKSXllEmXXX superior cjaim to wield the fiduciary trust of political power over others• When we take all this together with Mill's rigorous insistence on the Imits to the sphere within which the siite and even society may legitimately interfere with the liberty of the individual, we can see how far his conception of liberal principles leads him to reject the notion of an omnivompetent democraXtic state*

Ih the century or so that has elapsed simce Mill and de Tocque- ville wrote the oninicompetent democratic state has evolved rapidly into the modern forms of collectivism with v/hich we have all of us lived all or most of our lives• Sometimes socialist, sometimes totalitarian, the characteristic political systems of thts period have alv/ays been mass states reflecting the forces whose operation in their o\vn time Mill and de Tocqueville discerned and no doubt evincing many of the features they dreaded. The the question of collectivism for Mill and de Tocqueville was X question of socialism; and on this ques tion there is both agreement and disagreement betv/een their ideas. Inasmuch as socialism represented an extreme development of the power of the eentralised state, involving sweeping state interference v/ith the private choices and actions of the individual, it was something both Mill and de Tocqueville necessarily rejected^. To de Tocqueville, indeed, socialism represented the fulfilement of the revolutionary attack on the old order, good and bad alike. The one established pillar left largely unshaken by the tidal wave of 1789 was, as he saw the matter, the institution of private property. This too, however, -13- would perish if the egualising force of democracy had free and unrestrained play; and if that force directed the immense power of centralised ma(fcate machimeryj then an immense collecyive tyranny would he imposed updn/society» For de Tocqueville, then, property remained sacred, hoth in itself and as one of the indispensable roots of personalfreedom; and socialism was an unredeemed evil, the ultimate manifestation of the dangerous potentialities of democracy.

With Hill things were not so simple. He remained throughout his life, it is true, an adherent of an economic theory in which competition and private enterprise were indispenahle to efficiency and thus to the maximum wellheing of society. State socialism he alvmys regarded as a recipe for waste, bungling, and bureau cratic oppression® Property too he regarded as a genuine and important right. But it was Ksxfiitx not in the end sacrosanct in his thought and from the I8h0's onwards, if not before, he was more and more, concernfcd for the lot of the propertyless mass of the population in a developing industrial society. Attracted at an early stageX in his develoxmient by some aspects of St Simonian social ism, he was for the last twenty or tv;enty~fIve j'-ears a convinced beiever in the beneficial poitotial of producers' co-operation, a system which might even, he thought, in the end replace private capitalism altogether. But if in this sense Mill became and remained a socialist, it is important to see tlmit this kind of soci.?liBm is in no way at variance with his suspicion of the omnicompetent state® Indeed one might even say that the notion of devolving economic power to small groups of freely associated individuals is itself yet another manifestation of Mill's fear of monopoly* -11^- of centralisation, of mess power.

For Acton iioo, whose aareer as a writer "began as those of de Tocgueville and Mill were ending, socialism was an inescapa"ble proljlem* His reaction to it in some respects resemhled de Tocqneville's insogar as he sees in it the conclusion of a kind of fatal democratic logic• He d scri'bed socialisra in 1877 as "the infirmity which

ttacks mature " and he never lost his suspicion of this as of all forces tendimg towards the concentration of a"bsolute pomrer in the hands of the state® At the same time he was increasingly aware "both of the pro"blems that gave "birth tosocialist remedies and of the theoretical literature in v/hich these remedies were expounding® He knew Marx's v/ork ?/lthoit, pro"ba'bly, fully appreci ating its significance® He knew, respected, and certainly over rated the academic German "socialism of the chair"® A"bove all, for all the dedicated intellectualism of his orrn life, for all his conviction of the formative importance of ideas in human history, he knew the importance of economic forces and the moral relevance of economic situations® He recognised the importance of Harrington's analysis of seventeenth century xJi'o^lecis in economic terms® More important, he came to tee ngnise in what riere for him novel ways

the relevance of economic factors to the political pro"blems of his own time® He put high in the list of Gladstone'e merits as a statesman his understanding "that the men who pay 'wages ought not to "be the political masters of those who earn them, ("because laws ought to "be adapted to those who have the heaviest stake in the country, for v/hom misgovernment means not mortified pride or stinted luxury, "but want and pain, and degradation and risk to their own lives and to their children's souls)..." The man who wrote these words m 1880 -15- had moved far from the Whig doctrine that pov/er and proerty necessarily and rightly go together•

Yet it was from a Whig position as much as anything that Acton had started® Hiw mother's second marriage to EiSiMXXH

Lord Granville "brought him into intimate contact with \¥higgery in its sunset glow, and the "brash Y/higgism of Macaulay seems to have attracted him in his early days. But he was soon feeding his immensely powerful intellect on stronger meat. His training with D61linger schooled him in the rigours of the new scientific history and ingrained in him standards of accuracy and critical assessment which he never a"bated. At the same time he "began to shape his

"broader ideas on politics and society in the light of one whose figure dominated much of his thought at every phase. It was Burke who gave Acton's thought some of its deepest foundations and to say this is to go far towards an explanation of his suspicion of democracy and revolution. Even when he himself had "become an almost passionate ly doctrinaire li"beral in many respects he retained his Burkean sense of the past, of tradition, of limits to human power. In the ZKIEXXK^X

ZM2CXiOCEeld^Oq.asie§sment of Gladstone already quoted one of the great man's merits is his capacity to "understand and feel sympathy for institutions that incorporate tradition and prolong the reign of

"the dead." It was "by no means accddaAtal that Acton found his political leader and patron in one who had come to li"beralism from conservative "beginnings and with an enduring loyalty to High

Church Anglicanism.

Now Burke is perhaps to "be classed as a li"beral conservative j -16- and certainly if the Btirkean Acton who wrote with such dazzling

"brilliance in the Ramhler and the Hone and Foreigh Review in the early l860's is to he called a liberal he ims an extremely conservative liberal• To make one point only by way of illustration, a liberal who could and did defend both the Austrian imperial system and the claims of the Southern States in America evidently wore his liberalsm v;ith a considerable difference• In fact it would not be too much of an overstatement to say that the essence of Acton's early liberalism lay in his attitude ta the Church rather than the State. Evidently no account of Acton, however remote its centre of interest may be from the Syllabus of "^rors and the first Vatican Council, can ignore the anguish and ambivalence of his relationship with the Catholic Church.

The theme is indeed by no means peripheral here, for Acton's liberal Catholicism is very much part of the general theme we are ]QQQ£ exploring. The Liberal Catholics were one of the most important of the groups who accepted XKK one part while rejecting other parts of the revolutionary tradition and inheritance. The notion of a free church in a free state depended on accepting many liberal values and institutions which conservative Catholicism had rejected and continued to reject. Acton*s conviction was that the church had no thing to fear either from political liberty, properly understood, or from intellectual liberty. He sought to apply to the church and its history those rigorous standards of histirical

judgement he had leanned from and with D81linger. His own clash with the ecclesiastical authorities followed by Pius IX's Syllabus of 186U represBnted a serious check, which became a major defeat -17- with the victory of Ultramontanism at the Vatican Council and the promulgation of papalXSSiHZniXX^DC infallibility. His failure ever to recover completely from these "blows (received before he was forty) was Acton's personal tragedy; our concern here is with the way in which the conflicts with Rome intensified and accelera ted the development of his liberalism.

To Acton power was always morally dangerous? and absolutism was inevitably corrupting, Ulyramontanism in the church, monarchicalabsolytism or revolutionary democracy in the state, all had this in common that they represented the victory of power over right. In the church this meant for Acton "the ungodly ethics of the Papacy, the Inquisition, the Jesuits". In the state it had meant in the past the tyranny of despotic monarchy; it would mean in the future the still more absolute tyranny of an unlimited mass power. The vi^e in these systems for Acton is always their sacrifice of ethical values to ambition and power, He turned to liberal politics with passionate enthusiasm - politics became, on his own avowal, something like religion for him, a political party something like a church, This was because he came to believe that in politics, properly conducted, "the ethical purposes are supreme", "A Liberal,^" he v/rote "holds that a soTind morality and escape from sin is more easy to find in philosophy than in religion, •, he is essentially secular," Prom an early position like de Tocoueville*s where religion was the guardian of morality and the safeguard of political freedom, Acton had moved by 1877 to a position in which

"liberty,.. is the essential condition and guardian of religion," -IS-

Liberty - which for Acton meant always ahove all liberty of conscience, freedom to do one's duty as one smv it - thus became paramount. And liberty was somethimg to be secured by political means. That these means must include a large measure of democracy Acton no longer doubted or questioned• But he was never satisfied that democracy alone in any simple sense could secure liberty. He remained convinced that democracy in some forms might threaten liberty even more seriously than its rivals. "It is bad to be persecuted by a minority, but it is worse to be persecuted by a majority." The power of the majority unrestrained would be the ultimate power, the power against which no wit would run firom which no eppeal v/ould lie. Demo cracy and above all democracy when dyna^iically united with nationality^, would go further than any other system towards substituting v/ill for reason, power for right in the conduct of huam affairs. How could the democratic state be made a free state, within v/hich a free church and free men could live their lives in peace and security?

Fuadamentally for Acton this was a matter of establishing sound principles, of vibdicating the supreme claims of right, of asserting the effective existence of a higher law supreme over the laws made by mere political power. 1776 became for him, in an extraordinary fashion, the supreme moment in modern histroy, because of the bold, bald assertion of right in the Declaration of

Independence. Against the conservtive Brke of the 1790's he set

the more liberal Burke he found in the speeches and v/ritings on American affairs in the 1770's. But the hold of the later Burke on- Acton's mind never wholly gave way. His historical understanding combined with the realities of political experience to convince him -19-

that abstract right alone was not enough. There must he concrete institutional safeguards if liberty was to survive• One s4.ch safe guard was the decentralisation of power. Like Mill, like de Tocqueville, Acton feared the tecentralised statej and to their grounds for fearing it he addd his ov/n prophetic fears of the oppressive potentialties of a centralised state based on exclusive nationality. The federal state, the multinational state, the state which "includes several nationalities without oppressing any of them" - this 1QQE30$KXX had early been and it remained part of Acton s political ideal. In Gladstone's policy of Home Rule for

Ireland he saw the seed of a development which could go far to preserve and guarantee liberty by dividing the powers of the state.

But above all, perhaps, it v/as essential that the new wine of deomocracy be somehow kept within the old bottles of established and traditional processes and institutions. We have seen already how Acton valued Gladstone's respect for these institutions which

"prolonged the reign of the d ad". Acton himself was to defend the House of Lrds in 1881 as a part of the traditional framework of the constitution, as part, one might say, of the constitution of liberty itself.

None of the three men considered in this paper is easily pigepn- holed. Each of them in his way might have adopted Walt \¥h±tman's words X as his own -

Do I contraduct myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself I am large, I contain multitudes. -20-

But In part at least their ambiguities and inconsistencies arose from the complexity of the problems they were concerned to analyse, and the extent to which their thought pointed forward from their own time. Already, in an age when democracy was still engaged in its struggle -with absolutismaX and privilge, they were anticipating the problem of preser'ving liberal Talues in a democraetic society, ?/e can scarcely allow ourselves much complacency in the presence of their perplexities.