ABSTRACT
In each of the three great wars that dominated the twentieth century, democracy won. On the face of it, these victories seem to close a chapter of history. The slide toward centralized bureaucracy that troubled Alexis de Tocqueville has accelerated at a stupendous rate. It has buried beneath its files the better part of private life. Tocqueville, who popularized the word "bureaucracy", foresaw the trend; he did not foresee the immensity of its sweep. Tocqueville, in his day, foresaw that the idea of America would one day defeat the ideas of monarchy and aristocracy. The idea of the centrally administered paternal state has come to America from Europe. It took it about fifty years to transit from Bismark's Berlin to Franklin Roosevelt's Washington, and another fifty to push the nation to the brink of insolvency. Tocqueville did not see the French Revolution as a break in this continuity.
