ABSTRACT

In the early days of the Republic, American society tended to give its allegiance to the ideal of the austere society. Some of the Founders had been reared in the history of Republican Rome. A hedonistic society tends ineluctably to a state of anomie, the alienation of the individual from society. This is a fact noted by historians from Tacitus to Toynbee. The condition of anomie, in turn, leads to surrender of individual civic responsibility, and so to despotism, either in the form of an irremovable ruling class or of an absolute ruler, mostly the latter. Alexis de Tocqueville anticipated the transformation in the American ethos. Tocqueville's description of the welfare state's rise is incisive, but he is not arguing against democracy on those grounds. Tocqueville observes; he records; he projects. Bureaucratization of life and a proliferation of public drones are sapping the spontaneity and self-reliance that, so it seemed to Tocqueville, constitute the strongest traits of the American character.