CONCEPT
Soft Despotism
Tocqueville’s name for the distinctively democratic form of servitude—an immense and tutelary power that provides for a people’s every need, anticipates its every want, and in doing so keeps it in a perpetual childhood from which no coercion is required because the citizens experience their own management as care.
Soft despotism is
Alexis de Tocqueville’s name for the oppression democratic peoples should fear most—and the one they are least equipped to recognize, because it arrives wearing the face of benevolence. Near the end of the second volume of
Democracy in America, he confesses that he must grope for words because the thing is new and the old vocabulary will not fit: tyranny and despotism carry overtones of violence that do not apply. What he then describes is an immense and tutelary power that provides for citizens’ security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, and regulates the descent of their property. This power does not tyrannize; it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people until each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd. It does not break