Alexis de Tocqueville and Public Administration

Abstract

can political institutions, though like many classics it has been perhaps more highly regarded than frequently read. As the American scene changed from what it was when he visited our shores, and other and more recent observers described our ways and speculated upon our future, Tocqueville's works tended more and more to gather the dust of disuse, and his name, though still honored, to recede more and more into the darkening shadows of time. But with the advent of the one hundredth anniversary of the appearance of his book, many scholars paused to reconsider this early critic of our institutions and rendered homage to his memory by a considerable number of books, articles, and addresses. More important, perhaps, than this centennial occasion in bringing Tocqueville's works back to notice was the maturing of certain political trends, to which he had called attention ten decades ago, into social conditions which very dramatically confirm some of the pessimistic predictions he had made as to the future of democracy. Alexis de Tocqueville, who had been regarded previously as one of the minor, though authentic, voices of the nineteenth century, has, with the rise of the new mass states of the present time, achieved a considerable refurbishment of his reputation. Indeed, by some recent critics he has been ranked, no doubt extravagantly, as a political scientist next in rank only to Aristotle and Machiavelli and as the unerring prophet of the mass state, of democratic despotism, and of totalitarian equality in servitude. Despite the wealth of comment elicited by this recent rediscovery of Tocqueville, o e important aspect of his career has passed almost completely unnoticed. This neglected aspect of his work is his significance as a thinker on public administration and as an advocate of reforms in the system prevailing in his country. While this is a less spectacular aspect of his career than his role as the gloomy prophet of the despotic tendencies of evolving democracy, he was unquestionably a shrewd and penetrating analyst of public administration, and it is rather surprising that his contribution in this field has been so generally neglected. It is the purpose of this paper to present some of the important materials on the administrative phase of his thought and action. This account can hardly be complete, partly because of lack of space in this Review, but principally because many of the pertinent documents are in the Tocqueville family archives in occupied France. But the main outlines of his thinking on public administration are clear, notwithstanding the inaccessibility of some desirable documents. Tocqueville's mind was continually turning to things administrative, and in his correspondence, which was extensive, and in his published works, which are not so numerous as one might desire from so gifted a political scholar, he speaks his mind very fully on a number of topics of importance to present-