ABSTRACT
One of the great enigmas of political history, never mind political sociology, is how liberalism transformed itself from a stinging critic of state power over society, into the pivotal crusader for state power as a mechanism for instituting social welfare. The problem for society, according to Alexis de Tocqueville, was the way in which state power absorbed all intermediary organizations and sapped society of its vitality. Tocqueville dubbed the goal of social order by means of unchecked state power as "democratic despotism"–a close handmaiden to what Karl Wittfogel was to call in this century "Oriental despotism" and what Walter Laqueur was to refer to as "third world dictatorship". Tocqueville realized that it was not the existence of laws and court systems that made the difference, so much as "the American judges have the right of declaring laws to be unconstitutional".
