… the anti-hierarchical sentiment has always
existed and the chief social contradiction is precisely the contrast between
the necessity for hierarchy and the sentiment for equality. Men then experience the need, not to destroy government
– man is naturally an archic animal – but to destroy and
weaken, as far as lies in their power, all the deputy governments, all the
authorities, castes, classes, corporations, which come in layers between them
and the central government. What they
commonly call Liberty is no other than this thing. The subject in the Oriental
empire thinks he is free; the Roman people hailed Caesar as a liberator. It is noticeable that people never, or very
slightly, lavish a religious respect upon a caste, but very often and very
easily do so upon a single master, an Oriental despot, a Roman Caesar, a French
Napoleon. He represents the popular
force incarnate in one man. In what way
does he then represent it? By suppressing
hierarchy, which popular force always wants to suppress. In this way he represents not, it is true, the people itself, but one
of the people’s instincts, and the keenest of them, in a state of victory. Therefore the people is not entirely mistaken
in seeing itself represented by him.[1]
[1] See
Emile Faguet, “Tocqueville” in
Politicians and Moralists of the Nineteenth
Century, tr. Dorothy Galton (London: Ernest Benn, 1928), pp. 81,82. This English translation of Volume 3 of
Faguet’s, Politiques et moralists du
dix-neuvième siècle (originally published in 1899) appears in the
Library of European Political Thought series edited by Harold J. Laski.
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