Tocqueville and the Bureaucratic Foundations of Democracy in America

• Published date: 01 June 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231199279
• Author: Douglas I. Thompson
• Date: 01 June 2024

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231199279

Political Theory

2024, Vol. 52(3) 404 –430

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917231199279

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Article

Tocqueville and

the Bureaucratic

Foundations of

Democracy in America

Douglas I. Thompson1

Abstract

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

1Department of Political Science, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA

Corresponding Author:

Douglas I. Thompson, Department of Political Science, University of South Carolina,

Gambrell, 817 Henderson St., Columbia, SC 29208-0001, USA.

Email: dthompso@mailbox.sc.edu

1199279PTXXXX10.1177/00905917231199279Political TheoryThompson

research-article2023

Thompson 405

1. All citations of DA refer to the Goldhammer translation (2004) unless otherwise

indicated. I modify the translation occasionally using the 1848 French edition.

2. Like Wolin, I use the terms administration and bureaucracy interchangeably,

following contemporary usage. Tocqueville uses the term administration exclu-

sively because bureaucratie then carried strong negative connotations, evoking

“the abusive influence of clerks” (Académie Française 1835).

nostalgia for a lost age of do-it-yourself White settler democracy in a time

before bureaucracy in America.

Keywords

Tocqueville, bureaucracy, public administration, American political develop-

ment, political science and political theory

One of Alexis de Tocqueville’s most well-known empirical observations in

Democracy in America (henceforth DA) regards the absence of national-level

public administration in the United States. In multiple passages, Tocqueville

(2004) reports that “administrative centralization does not exist” in the United

States and is “virtually unknown” there (99, 301).1 Whatever public adminis-

tration does exist in the United States is fragmented, small-scale, and subna-

tional. Administrative oversight of roads, taxes, schools, and other “public

things” (Honig 2017) takes place at the municipal, county, and state levels

throughout the United States, but “there is no central hub toward which the

spokes of administrative power converge” (Tocqueville 2004, 82). There is

indeed “no administrative hierarchy anywhere” in the United States, as the

federal government “has no administrative officials of its own assigned to

fixed locations throughout its territory” (92, 101). Tocqueville states defini-

tively and repeatedly that public administration in the United States is

“extraordinarily decentralized” (94).

Tocqueville scholars of diverse theoretical approaches and commitments

generally treat these empirical claims as factually accurate and internally con-

sistent. Tocqueville is simply observing an administrative system that is “delib-

erately decentralized,” “undeveloped,” and marked by an “absence of

bureaucratization” (Wolin 2001, 262).2 The United States presents Tocqueville

with “an extreme case of administrative decentralization” (Schleifer 2012,

104). In this prevailing view, Tocqueville “is able . . . to grasp the actual state

of affairs” in the United States when making these assessments and is therefore

rightly “interested in the decentralized administration of government that he

had found in America” (Bambrick 2018, 587; cf. Jaume 2013, 31; Maletz 2003,

30–31; Mansfield 2010, 16; Swedberg 2009, 30–31; Zuckert 1983).