Alexis de Tocqueville was encouraged by what he saw in the United States of the early nineteenth century. America was a democracy in which the people’s needs were met by their own local, self-organized “associations” of all kinds, not by an all-provident centralized authority. Equality did not mean social atomization and dependence upon one great unequal power, the state itself. American democracy was neither mob rule nor the equality of pupils under a master.

Yet Tocqueville was not at all certain that this kind of self-government would survive in the long run. He had many practical grounds for concern, but the root of his doubt was to be found in human nature itself. To continue ruling themselves, Americans would have to persist in taking an interest in politics. But the very freedom they enjoyed gave them the opportunity to turn to private pursuits instead, leaving higher levels of government to do for communities what active citizens should have been able to do for themselves. Over time, government at every level has in fact become something millions of Americans are content to leave to the experts: professional bureaucrats and policymakers. 

Tocqueville had seen—and eventually described in The Old Regime and the French Revolution—how the nobles responsible for local government in France had given up their duties to the communities in their care to lead lives of greater luxury in Paris and at court instead. To take their place in the country, the king of France appointed new officials answerable directly to him. Some thing similar could happen in America: if French aristocrats willingly gave up the burdens of responsibility for a life of ease in the capital, wouldn’t American democrats sooner or later give up self-government for the comforts of private life?