Social Citizenship and a Reconstructed Tocqueville

Abstract

The implications of Alexis de Tocqueville's theory of democracy for current debates about social citizenship and the welfare state are explored. Systematizing accounts of Tocqueville's views on public relief have been one-sided and have facilitated efforts by the New Right to appropriate his legacy to justify New Right policies. A closer reading of Tocqueville, attentive to both his marginal and more central works, reveals good reasons for opposing the reforms that critics of public assistance have proposed in Tocqueville's time and in our own. The historicist view that Tocqueville's social and economic thought was incoherent, backward-looking, and increasingly irrelevant following capitalist industrialization is also criticized. While Tocqueville's theory of democracy requires revision in important respects, its potential has not been exhausted. In fact, a reconstruction of Tocqueville's theory of democracy goes well beyond the discourse of the New Right, pointing instead to the possibility of reforming the welfare state in a creative and innovative way through social policies that are enabling rather than tutelary, universalistic rather than targeted, preventive rather than compensatory, and associative rather than atomizing.