Tocqueville and the Bureaucratic Foundations of Democracy in America

• Published in: Political theory 2024-06, Vol.52 (3), p.404-430
• Main Author: Thompson, Douglas I.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Associations; Bureaucracy; Centralization; Democracy; Government agencies; Historians; Institutions; Nostalgia; Public administration; Townships; Voluntary organizations
• ISSN: 0090-5917; 1552-7476
• DOI: 10.1177/00905917231199279

One of Tocqueville’s best-known empirical claims in Democracy in America is that there is no national-level public administration in the United States. He asserts definitively and repeatedly that “administrative centralization does not exist” there. However, in scattered passages throughout the text, Tocqueville points to multiple federal agencies that contemporary historians and APD scholars characterize as instances of a growing national administrative system, such as the Post Office Department and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I reevaluate Tocqueville’s treatment of bureaucracy in America in light of this evidence. I contend that Tocqueville, perhaps in spite of himself, reveals even the most paradigmatic examples of active, democratic self-government in Democracy in America—townships and other voluntary associations—to be embedded in and causally supported by a network of interrelated, centralized public administrative institutions. Crucially, Tocqueville never resolves the tension between his acknowledgment of the causal power of these institutions and his claims that they do not exist. This new picture of the empirical and normative complexity of Tocqueville’s treatment of bureaucratic institutions offers a rich set of conceptual resources for contesting, among other claims, the political construction of nostalgia for a lost age of do-it-yourself White settler democracy in a time before bureaucracy in America.