Making Non-Citizens: Consequences of Administrative Centralization in Tocqueville's Old Regime

“Individualism” as a deliberate indifference to public life and to the responsibilities of active citizenship was first described in Tocqueville's Democracy in America. That discussion has often been taken to mean that this indifference is an inevitable consequence of modem democracy. Yet the mainly theoretical treatment of the problem in Democracy does not make such a strong claim, and should be read more as a warning of a possible danger than as a statement of a necessary result. The creation of an ethos of individualism as a substitute for citizenship is first fully described in Tocqueville's late work on the prerevolutionary regime in France. There he shows that incapacity for citizenship emerged less from the march toward equality than from the resort to highly centralized administrative methods as an instrument of modernizing reform. Tocqueville's argument in The Old Regime and the Revolution should be regarded as an essential component of his political science and, in particular, as a powerful study of the consequences for democracy of administrative centralization. Copyright 2003, Oxford University Press.