ABSTRACT
To the pained surprise of the military and industrial constituencies of the Atlantic Alliance, President Eisenhower, on the eve of his retirement from office, saw fit to warn his countrymen against a peril to the nation that it did not have to face under his predecessors. America's investment in arms in the postwar years was unprecedented for peacetime, second only to its investment in social welfare, and undoubtedly that investment is laced by waste and corruption—as is social welfare and virtually every major public undertaking in the country. The interdependence of contractors and subcontractors, and of sub-subcontractors, is bewilderingly complex. This worried Eisenhower, as it did Alexis de Tocqueville. If, as Tocqueville held, the democratic state tends towards centralization and, hence, the extension of its writ to the free and uncontrolled margins of civility, than the vicissitudes of the "military-industrial complex" afford a preview of how this "weakness" of democracy might stand democracy on its head.
