The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century

by Helena Rosenblatt

A few years later, in the second volume of Democracy in America (1840), Tocqueville called for increased state intervention to help the poor. Private charity was not enough, he now declared; “public charity” was necessary. He worried about the emergence of an “industrial aristocracy.” Factory owners were growing ever richer, more powerful, and more arrogant while the workers became increasingly demoralized and dehumanized. “This man resembles more and more the administrator of a vast empire,” he wrote, “that man a brute.” Because of the painful effects of industrialization and the division of labor, Tocqueville now concluded that workers required “the special consideration of the legislator.” The government needed to address endemic problems such as “the helplessness of infancy, the decrepitude of old age, sickness, insanity,” and it should furnish aid “in times of public calamities.” “It is at once necessary and desirable,” said Tocqueville, “that the central power that directs a democratic people be active and powerful. There is no question of rendering it weak or indolent, but only of preventing it from abusing its agility and force.”