Lefort and Tocqueville on the Possibility of Democratic Despotism

Abstract

Of Tocqueville’s many famous warnings, the one considered perhaps most prophetic today is that democratic modernity may paradoxically arc towards a modern form of despotism. Born in the antipaternalistic pursuit of freedom and equality, democratic society may end up giving itself up to a historically unprecedented type of paternalism — a sort of state maternalism. This is the “soft” and “mild” despotism Tocqueville struggles to envision as he looks towards the future of democracy in America. It is a coddling if not nurturing form of rule, more suppres-sive than oppressive, that takes shape in the minute regulation rather than the grand decree. Even while centralized in the state, power is administratively omnipresent in every detail of life. This despotism is democratic in source in that the very principles of popular sovereignty and equality upon which democracy is premised inculcate the mass neuroses of debilitating individualism and stultifying materialism, thereby generating the felt need among democratic peoples for a supervisory, controlling, caring power. And it is democratic in appearance in that its very abstract, impersonal character renders it outwardly compatible with at least a superficial experience of freedom and equality. Unlike the commanding power of the aristocracy, the managerial power of the state mechanism is faceless and nameless, and so potentially pervasive without being experienced as invasive — everywhere at once by virtue of being nowhere in particular.