Democracy in America

by Alexis de Tocqueville

The townships generally submit to the state only when it is a question of an interest that I shall call social, that is to say, which they share with others.

The obligation is strict, but the state government, in imposing it, does nothing but decree a principle; for its execution the township generally recovers all its rights of individuality.

In France,

the central government lends its agents to the township; in America, the township lends its officials to the government. That alone makes understandable the degree to which the two societies differ.

The New England township unites two advantages that, everywhere they are found, keenly excite men’s interest; that is to say: independence and power.

The inhabitant of New England is attached to his township not so much because he was born there as because he sees in that township a free and strong corporation that he is a part of and that is worth his trouble to seek to direct.

County officials are not elected and their authority is restricted.

The state itself has only a secondary importance; its existence is obscure and tranquil.

The federal government confers power and glory on those who direct it, but the men to whom it is given to influence its destinies are very few in number.

It is in the township, at the center of the ordinary relations of life, that desire for esteem, the need of real interests, the taste for power and for attention, come to be concentrated;

See with what art they have taken care in the American township, if I can express myself so, to scatter power in order to interest more people in public things.

This political existence impresses on society a continual, but at the same time peaceful, movement that agitates it without troubling it.

The American county is very analogous to the arrondissement in France.

to which are attached neither affection nor memory nor community of existence.

It is created only for a purely administrative interest.

county therefore forms the first judicial center.

Each county has a court of justice,10 a sheriff to execute the decrees of tribunals, a prison to hold criminals.

In Massachusetts this authority resides in the hands of a certain number of magistrates whom the governor of the state designates with the advice11 of his council.

These administrators do nothing but prepare the budget of the county; the legislature votes it.13 There is no assembly that directly or indirectly represents the county.

The county therefore has, to tell the truth, no political existence.

What most strikes the European who travels through the United States is the absence of what is called among us government or administration.

There are two means of diminishing the force of authority in a nation. The first is to weaken power in its very principle by removing from society the right or the ability to defend itself in certain cases: to weaken authority in this manner is in general what in Europe is called founding freedom.

There is a second means of diminishing the action of authority:

dividing the use of its forces among several hands; of multiplying officials while allocating to each of them all the power he needs to do what he is destined to execute.

In the United States, therefore, they did not claim that a man in a free country has the right to do everything; on the contrary, they imposed on him more varied social obligations than elsewhere; they did not have the idea of attacking the power of society in its principle and of contesting its rights; they limited themselves to dividing it in its exercise.

the New England townships were not under supervision. They themselves took care of their particular interests.

in Massachusetts administrative power is almost entirely confined within the township;17 but it is divided there among many hands.

Thus nowhere does there exist a center at which the spokes of administrative power converge. How, therefore, does one succeed in conducting society on a nearly uniform plan?

In the New England states, the legislative power extends to more objects than among us.

Hence it results that if all secondary bodies and all officials conform to the law, society proceeds in a uniform manner in all its parts;

if all secondary bodies and all officials conform to the law, society proceeds in a uniform manner in all its parts; but it still remains to know how one can force the secondary bodies and their officials to conform to the law.

but it still remains to know how one can force the secondary bodies and their officia...

in a g...

society finds at its disposition only two means to oblige officia...

It can confide a discretionary power in one of them to direct all the others and to discharge t...

Or instead it can charge the courts to inflict judicial pena...

one can neither discharge an elected magistrate nor raise him in grade.

Peoples who introduce election into the secondary workings of their government are therefore forcibly led to make great use of judicial penalties as a means of administration.

Between the central power and elected administrative bodies only tribunals can serve as an intermediary. They alone can force the elected official to obedience without violating the right of the elector.

The extension of the judicial power into the political world ought therefore to be correlative to the extension of the elective power. If these two things do not go together, in the end the state falls into anarchy or into servitude.

The Americans have taken from their fathers, the English, the idea of an institution that has no analogy with what we know on the continent of Europe, which is justices of the peace.

midway between man of the world and magistrate,

The justice of the peace is an enlightened citizen, but who is not necessarily versed in knowledge of the law. So they charge him only with keeping the order of society, a thing that d...

is an enlightened citizen, but who is not necessarily versed in k...

Americans have appropriated the institution of justices of the peace, while removing from it the aristocratic character that distinguishes it in the mother country.

Should the public official of New England commit a crime in the exercise of his functions, the ordinary tribunals are always called in to do justice upon him.

Should he commit an administrative fault, a purely administrative tribunal is charged with punishing him, and when the thing is grave or pressing, the judge does what the official should have done.

Finally, should the same official be guilty of one of these elusive offenses that human justice can neither define nor appraise, he appears annually before a tribunal without appeal that can reduce him suddenly to impotence; his power departs from him with his mandate.

in its execution it encounters a practical difficulty

the administrative tribunal named the court of sessions does not have the right to inspect the magistrates of a township; it can, in legal terms, act only when it is seised of a matter.