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satisfaction of civil needs and wants. Tocqueville disapproves of
notions of justice which make no reference to the responsibility of each
individual for his or her eternal destiny and to the responsibility
that each person has for the welfare of the other. It is not the satisfac-
tion of social needs, but virtue and self-government of individuals
44 New liberalism
which Tocqueville desires: We do not want functionaries but political
men. 111 The most poignant injustice of administrative centralization
lies in that it crushes the individual s dignity it robs the individual of
his or her possibility to serve God and humanity according to his or
her own ability.
In contrast with utilitarian and expressive individualisms that
propose that the state should assume the responsibility for poverty
relief, Tocqueville does not believe that the individual is called on to
deal with the poverty of society but with the poverty of other fellow
beings. He considers poverty relief to be the responsibility of the
charity of individuals. Though he recognizes the danger, of individuals
not being able to relieve the poor when the latter are on too large a
scale and, of individuals who fail to fulfil their charitable duties to
humanity, he nevertheless argues that the excessive claims for poverty
relief is always a temporal and not a structural phenomenon. Though a
rise in the number of claims for charity confronts the community with
a temporary threat, in the sense that all the poor cannot always be
relieved, it does not follow that the state is therefore meant to take
over its charitable role. Tocqueville notes that the expansion of admin-
istrative centralization is the result of a collective response to the
increasing needs and expectations of the poor. Poverty relief, education
and health care are not the responsibilities of the state but of faithful
and therefore charitable individuals. Tocqueville observes, without
approval, that
Almost all the charitable establishments of Europe were formerly
in the hands of private persons or of guilds; they are now almost
all dependent on the supreme government, and in many countries
are actually administered by that power. The state almost exclus-
ively undertakes to supply bread to the hungry, assistance and
shelter to the sick, work to the idle, and to act as the sole reliever
of all kinds of misery.112
Tocqueville observes the breakdown of the moral community. Like
Bonald, he seeks to combat utilitarian and romantic individualisms and
to re-awaken that fine spirit of local patriotism which had worked
such wonders in the Middle Ages .113 Differently from Bonald,
however, Tocqueville deplores the fact that, not only democratic gov-
ernments but also the monarchy progressively deprived the people of
their liberty. For Tocqueville, the deprivation of liberty and the decline
of the community went hand in hand with the rise of centralization.
Bonald, on the other hand, was concerned with the disintegration of
social relationships under the old regime. He envisaged control and the
New liberalism 45
enforcement of norms by the community as the remedy against
destructive individualism.114
Centralization of administrative authority takes responsibilities away
from citizens. As a result, Tocqueville argues, solidarity ties between cit-
izens are weakened and citizens become isolated from one another. Toc-
queville regards this process of administrative centralization a process
that Durkheim termed as institutionalized individualism as being
irreligious, because it destroys charity and fills individuals with ambi-
tious designs. Centralization of administrative authority drives religious
authority out of the centre of society to its periphery. Tocqueville
stresses that the ally of administrative control is not religion but science:
To prove that human misery is the work of laws and not of Providence,
and that poverty can be suppressed by changing the conditions of
society. 115 Social reformers like Bacon and Bentham propose a form of
rational statecraft, working through guidance of government action
through social enquiry. Tocqueville does not support this scientific
project of social reform. For him, poverty can only be solved if the
solidarity ties between those who possess property and those who do
not, are strengthened. When Tocqueville visits the factories in Birming-
ham and Manchester in the 1830s, he is not shocked by the material
poverty of the workers (their long working hours, their poverty and
their exhaustion), but he is appalled by their moral poverty (physical
degeneration, lack of hygiene, drunkenness, delinquency, sexual profli-
gacy, envy). In common with Catholic opinion (e.g. Villeneuve-
Bargemont and Von Ketteler), Tocqueville holds industrialization
responsible for the poverty and demoralization of the working class.
The poor considered the rich to be the only source of their poverty. But
Tocqueville considers them as the victims of a moral poverty besides
their material deprivation. It is for this reason that Tocqueville is critical
of philanthropy. For, philanthropists create hatred among the poor by
their very expressions of humanitarian aid. In fact, the irony is that they
are themselves guilty for the gap between rich and poor. Though phil-
anthropists seek to help the poor by providing goods, in doing so they
make the poor dependent of the philanthropist s will; philanthropy
results in the creation of an idle and lazy class, living at the expense of
the industrial and working class .116
Tocqueville somehow identifies philanthropy with rational Protes-
tantism. That religion proposes labour, reform and working discipline
for all individuals as the answer to the problem of poverty relief. Toc-
queville says:
There are two kinds of welfare. One leads each individual, accord-
ing to his means, to alleviate the evils he sees around him. This
46 New liberalism
type is as old as the world; it began with human misfortune. Chris-
tianity made a divine virtue out of it, and called it charity. The
other, less instinctive, more reasoned, less emotional, and often
more powerful, leads society to concern itself with the misfortunes
of its members and is ready systematically to alleviate their suffer-
ings. This type is born of Protestantism and has developed only in
modern societies.117
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