Tocqueville and Mill: Democracy as a Threat to Liberty

Introduction: Democracy and the Threat to Liberty

Both Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill viewed democracy as a mechanism that could easily become tyrannical and thus overwhelm individual liberty. Considering that democracy in its various forms — direct, representative, and constitutional — is capable of being corrupted (voters and/or representatives may be bribed, coerced, misinformed, misled, subjugated, or harassed), it is not difficult to see that both thinkers are correct: democracy can be a threat to the liberty of the individual precisely because it is not necessarily predicated on truth, rightness, or goodness.

Is there any system of government that does not represent a potential threat to individual liberty when it is not predicated on truth, rightness, or goodness? As Plato argues in The Republic, the ideal state is one led by a philosopher-king who pursues truth and regards the citizens as his own children, making correct decisions for them in the same manner as a father makes decisions for his family.¹ For society to function, there must be some limit on what is permitted and what is not permitted — in terms of rightness and wrongness.

Mill's standpoint is that what is permitted should be based on what promotes the greatest happiness for society — a pragmatic, or utilitarian, consideration. For Tocqueville, the question of what is permitted carries a decidedly more moral character, rooted in his traditional sense of moral order as promoted by the Church. Ironically, personal liberty in both cases takes a back seat to moral or natural order and the common good.

The concept of liberty was enshrined in Western society alongside fraternity and equality during the Enlightenment — formally in the French Revolution, but practically in the American Revolution. De Tocqueville, a French Catholic who traveled to America to investigate firsthand the grand democratic experiment, described some of the inherent conflicts of interest posed by liberty in a democratic society. As a Catholic, Tocqueville's perspective was shaped by a sense of moral order and correctness — right and wrong according to both natural and supernatural law — and therein lay the difficulty.

Tocqueville's Moral Framework and the Dangers of Democratic Liberty

Liberty of the press, for instance, could be seen as a safeguard against tyranny and authoritarianism by giving voice to the opinions of just men and women. But it could also allow the base or false opinions of an individual to be suddenly adopted by the whole — which would be problematic in an altogether different way: there would be liberty, but error would reign.² With error reigning over the minds of men, liberty itself would not last long. The need for more and more control would quickly become evident, and such control would likely not be applied in a correct or moral manner.

Tocqueville's concern was not merely theoretical. His observations of American democratic life led him to conclude that the majority could exercise a form of social tyranny far subtler — and in some ways more dangerous — than overt political despotism. The pressure of public opinion, the conformity it enforces, and the way it silences dissent without resorting to law all threatened the interior freedom of the individual even when formal civil liberties remained intact. In Democracy in America, he traced these dynamics with a precision that continues to resonate in contemporary political life.

Mill's Utilitarianism and the Limits of Social Interference

Mill likewise held that one's personal actions are "right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness."³ In order to elaborate on this definition of rightness, Mill had to define happiness — which he did from an inherently Enlightenment perspective. For Mill, happiness is the absence of pain. In terms of governance, social pain comes by way of social tyranny, which is produced by the issuance of "wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which [society] ought not to meddle."⁴

Mill speaks of propriety with the same reverence that Tocqueville inherently holds for natural and moral law. He warned that individuals need to be protected "against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them."⁵ Finding the limit of "legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence" was a matter that society must consider "as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs."⁶ That limit, today, is far less clear than it was in Mill's own time.

Conclusion: Why Tocqueville and Mill Were Right

Tocqueville and Mill are both correct in determining that democracy is a threat to liberty. First, democracy is vulnerable to corruption at every level — from the voter to the legislator to the executive to the judicial. Human nature is not above corruption and, left to a legalistic system, will always find ways to exploit legal language for its own ends rather than for the ends for which the system is supposed to function. Second, democracy acts as an illusion of choice in the long run, while the ruling class makes the decisions that impact the lives of the lower classes. Democracy offers the common man the hope of having a say in how government conducts the business of overseeing the state — but the reality is far more complex than the simple narrative of everyone having a vote implies.

The reality is that ruling classes in the West never genuinely intended to produce equality among men and women — even as this ideal was enshrined by the enlightened revolutionaries in Paris in 1791. It is no surprise that the Romantic Era followed directly upon the Enlightenment: the ideals of that era were tied to notions that were one part noble, one part fantasy, and one part horrific. Liberty, as both Mill and Tocqueville understood, is not a product of democratic structures but an outcome that must be earned through fidelity to truth, rightness, and moral order.

Bibliography

De Tocqueville, Alexander. Democracy in America. Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/815/815-h/815-h.htm

Jones, E. Michael. Libido Dominandi. IN: St. Augustine Press, 2000.

Kolodny, Niko. "Rule Over None I: What Justifies Democracy?" Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 42, no. 3 (2014): 195–208.

Lickona, T. "The Return of Character Education." Educational Leadership, vol. 51, no. 3 (1993): 6–11.

Mill, J. S. On Liberty. Bartleby.

Plato. The Republic. IEP. http://www.iep.utm.edu/republic/#SH1e