In my post yesterday, I portrayed Alexis de Tocqueville (not inaccurately) as a critic of universal basic income. And indeed, there's much in his first "Memoir on Pauperism" (1835) that would give aid and comfort to the critics of today's welfare state. Any "law which regularly, permanently, and uniformly gives assistance to indigents," he writes, will operate as a sort of "poisoned seed" in society (Henderson trans.). What is to be found in that sentence with which "FreedomWorks" or "Americans for Prosperity" would not agree?
Still, though, I don't wish to leave the impression that Tocqueville was merely a proto-libertarian. It would be unjust to see him as a precursor to Hayek or Von Mises who rejected all forms of state intervention in the economy that might benefit the poor. Tocqueville was far too honest and clear-sighted a thinker for that. He was willing to see how a "good principle," like aiding the poor, could nonetheless sometimes yield a bad result; but he also wasn't one to throw up his hands in despair at that point and say oh, therefore, reform is always doomed; "as things are they remain" (Clough).
He was actually capable of more than one idea at a time—unlike so many public intellectuals; and he always thought things through. He recognized what Isaiah Berlin liked to call the conflict of values; and he didn't ignore values like equality and social justice merely because they could sometimes crowd out other goals. Indeed, he was fond of saying that his personal aesthetic preferences all pointed away from the direction of equality—but that he nonetheless recognized that this didn't weaken the logical or moral argument for this goal one whit.
Tocqueville's first "Memoir on Pauperism," then, may indeed offer some harsh words for cash benefit programs. But he is just as skeptical of the concentration of capital and of the way that industrial development had proceeded in the advanced capitalist economies of his time.
In inquiring into the roots of pauperism, Tocqueville begins with a paradox: namely, the fact that England was—at the time he wrote—both the most prosperous nation in Europe and the one with the largest population of indigents.
Now, if Tocqueville were a straightforward proto-libertarian and starry-eyed believer in the infinite wisdom of the free market, he could simply have attributed this excess of pauperism in England to the availability of poor relief and left it at that. But instead, Tocqueville inquires into deeper historical causes—and here, his analysis is not so different from that of Marx or Thomas More.
In essence, Tocqueville sees pauperism as an inevitable corollary to Britain's path of industrial development. In England—unlike in France after the revolution—land ownership was concentrated in an ever smaller number of hands as a result of the enclosures movement.
In some ways, Tocqueville concedes (ever the pluralist in the Berlinian sense, willing to recognize conflicts between valid social goals and values), this was a result of technological progress: modern farming techniques required fewer laborers. But it also had a massive downside in creating a surplus of displaced agricultural laborers—giving rise to that paradox Oliver Goldsmith described in his immortal eighteenth century poem "The Deserted Village"—namely, that poverty could exist alongside plenty in the English countryside, to an unprecedented degree.
This concentration of landed property created a push factor driving people out of the countryside, Tocqueville notes, at the same time that the lure of industrial factory jobs operated as a pull factor, drawing people to cities.
Now, in the classical model of economic development, these factory jobs will simply create enough work for the displaced agricultural population—ultimately at higher wages—and everyone will benefit in the long run from the concentration of capital. But here, Tocqueville makes a very interesting point that flies in the face of this conventional wisdom.
Indeed, industrialism often promotes unheard of degrees of "comfort" and prosperity, he writes—but it does so by creating and then satisfying needs that premodern civilizations largely did not recognize. Since these needs are in some sense artificial—hence, not really needs at all—they can be sacrificed easily, in times of an economic downturn, in a way that access to food cannot.
And so, in Tocqueville's telling, while agricultural communities may be poor—there is generally a floor of poverty beneath which they cannot fall (barring a climatic event or other natural catastrophe)—because the demand for their crops is more or less constant. Industrial products—however—because they offer comforts that would have been seen as luxuries to prior civilizations; not necessities—are far more subject to the perils of fluctuating demand (though Tocqueville does not speak in these terms); and workers producing these goods are far more subject to the risk of sudden ruin.
This provides a compelling explanation of why we so often seem to find prosperity and precarity growing up side by side in the process of economic development: why "wealth accumulates, and men decay," as Goldsmith put it. An industrial civilization, with highly concentrated capital, is almost always richer than a subsistence agriculture one with widely distributed land tenure—but it is also more subject to periodic industrial "crises," as Tocqueville calls them.
And indeed, we still see these patterns today—even in a country where agriculture has been so completely concentrated as to make smallhold farming a distant memory. Every time there is a cyclical downturn in the economy, investors will still rush into consumer staple companies and health care stocks—on the theory that people will still need these products even in a recession; whereas they exit technology and "growth" stocks en masse, on the theory that these are more vulnerable to sudden reversals of demand.
An economy based around ceaseless technological innovation—the "demon of Mechanism," as Carlyle called it—thus always creates unbounded new opportunities for both wealth and poverty. The two go hand in hand.
(This same realization has lent a certain sharpness to current fears of an AI bubble in the economy—since so many of the firms currently seeking to cash in on hype about the new technology appear to be making products that are eminently dispensable in the event of a downturn.)
All of this leads Tocqueville to ponder, at the end of the first "Memoir," whether "a more permanent and regular connection might be established between the production and the consumption of manufactured goods," such that overproduction in excess of demand would never lead to gluts that could trigger a depression.
Tocqueville was on the cusp here—had he but realized it—of the Keynesian insight that public policy could deliberately act to increase aggregate demand so as to avoid the perils of oversupply. Indeed, those cash benefit programs that Tocqueville deplores in the memoir are now generally recognized as automatic stabilizers that are actually essential to reestablishing a baseline of demand for consumer products when the economy is otherwise tipping into a recession.
All of this is already taking us far from knee-jerk libertarianism. Tocqueville recognizes that the plight of the "pauper" is not due purely to his laziness or the availability of cash aid alternatives to work—but also to the concentration of land holdings that forced him out of the subsistence lifestyle of his ancestors and the inherent instability and pattern of cyclical shocks to which industrial societies are prone.
He will go even further, though, in the "Second Memoir"—unfinished and unpublished in his lifetime—and never translated into English until the 2021 University of Notre Dame Press Christine Dunn Henderson edition, which is before me right now. In this hitherto-neglected work, Tocqueville inquires into potential solutions to mass poverty outside of the cash benefits that he regards as inherently doomed to fail; and here, his ideas go far beyond the clichés of neoliberalism, neoclassicism, or libertarianism as we know them today.
Specifically, Tocqueville recognizes that—if the root cause of pauperism lies, in part, in the concentration of capital, then the solution may be to more widely distribute it.
This proposal of course is far removed from socialism—which Tocqueville dreaded and loathed, throughout his life (see his recollections of the 1848 revolution, e.g.), seeing it as a threat to the "ancient laws of society" and the quintessence of the peril of excessive "centralization" that he saw as the bane of modern life—particularly in France.
But if Tocqueville was certainly no proto-socialist, he wasn't a "free market conservative" either, as we call them today. Instead, his ideology appears closest to that of "distributism"—the Catholic social teaching as interpreted by thinkers like Belloc or Chesterton; who—as abhorrent as some of their other views undoubtedly were—were certainly no straightforward apologists for capitalism. (Tocqueville's views could also be seen as anticipating themes of American populism of the late 19th century.)
The source of the problem in England, as we have seen, lay partially in the concentration of rural landholdings; and this was an evil of which France—following the revolution—was blessedly free. Tocqueville—like Jefferson—thus sees in the widespread distribution of small farm holdings the surest bedrock of a free and happy society. Where nearly every family owns its own land, they cultivate habits of independence and seize control of their own destiny, in a way conducive to human flourishing.
For the countryside, then, the solution is simple: where large landholdings exist, break them up into small peasant plots. And where widespread property division already exists in the rural districts—leave well enough alone.
The hard part, Tocqueville realizes, is what to do in an industrial society where large numbers of people no longer work the land. "Unlike with landed property, we have still not discovered a way of dividing industrial property so that it is not made unproductive; industry has preserved the aristocratic form[.]"
One solution, Tocqueville realizes, could be some form of industrial democracy or guild socialism. Why not—in other words—have firms run by their own workers? Would this not give them a stake in "the future" and a sense of independence that Tocqueville saw as essential to human dignity and the liberty and security of society?
Tocqueville is less hostile to such a possibility than one might expect. He says that such efforts to create worker-owned co-ops have largely failed so far, because they perish under circumstances of "ruinous competition." But, in keeping with the themes throughout his work of opposing centralization, and favoring small-scale experiments in non-coercive cooperative living, he suggests that voluntary associations might in future be able to achieve what had hitherto disappointed.
Certainly, he believed that people should not hesitate to continue to experiment along these lines; even if he recognized that it was not an immediate large-scale solution to society's woes.
Instead, Tocqueville saw some hope in the possibility of using savings banks as a means to transform the propertyless, landless proletariat into a class of small property holders. (Shades here of the proposals one hears about today—a friend of mine points out—to give every child a small investment account at birth.)
Such a solution, again, has little in common with socialism. In some ways—indeed—it is socialism's opposite. In place of a society without property, Tocqueville envisioned a society of universal property—which places him on the side of the future "distributivists," as mentioned above.
But this program obviously has just as little to do with modern industrial capitalism as it has with socialism.
Tocqueville was, it is clear, actually a critic of capitalism. His critique of cash welfare may align in some ways with the views of modern libertarians, but this is because—as he repeatedly said—he wants to look for "preventative" solutions to the problem of pauperism before it arises—so that no one ends up in the trap of relying on government benefits in the first place.
The neglected "Second Memoir," then, in many ways anticipates the debate we are having in policy circles today between "redistributive" and "pre-distributive" solutions to poverty.
Tocqueville may reject "redistribution" as a degrading, demoralizing, and disempowering answer to people who have been stripped of their livelihoods (and indeed, when people tell displaced workers today not to fear AI automation, because they might be able to survive on UBI checks, it's hard not to see Tocqueville's point).
But he is eagerly in favor of "pre-distributive" solutions that increase people's economic power from the jump, so that they are not displaced from their livelihoods or driven off their land in the first place.
And in many ways, Tocqueville's vision of widely distributed property ownership gels much better with our political traditions in this country than the proponents of today's varieties of "democratic socialism." We all—in this country—can see the injustice of the lopsided, quasi-dictatorial power that big business is able to exercise under conditions of oligarchic capitalism. But not all of us are persuaded that the answer to this lies in the concentration of more power in the hands of a central government.
It could be that the answer, instead, lies in the direction that Jefferson and Tocqueville descried: distributing economic power more widely, rather than bundling it into the hands of either mega-corporations or the state.
Indeed, a country where everyone is able to own their own small business or farm sounds an awful lot closer to the classical template of the "American dream" than either the neoliberal dystopia of today's techno-capitalists or the centralized collectivism of the socialists.
If we were looking around for which economic ideology seems the most natural fit with our country's political tradition, Tocqueville's suggestions in the "Second Memoir on Pauperism" come closer than either of these two alternatives.
It is sad that we do not turn to these sources of insight in our present moment, but instead continue a tired fight between the oligarchic rule of Trump-aligned plutocrats, on the one side, and European-style collectivist socialism on the other. The need has seldom been greater for a genuinely new way of thinking about social and economic problems, instead of this ceaseless oscillation between two ideas that have little purchase or appeal to our national consciousness.
As Keynes once aptly put it: "The next move is with the head, and fists must wait."
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