Mill, The Art of Government, Tocqueville (and Foucault), Part II

The native of New England is attached to his township because it is independent and free: his co-operation in its affairs ensures his attachment to its interest; the well-being it affords him secures his affection; and its welfare is the aim of his ambition and of his future exertions: he takes a part in every occurrence in the place; he practises the art of government in the small sphere within his reach; he accustoms himself to those forms which can alone ensure the steady progress of liberty; he imbibes their spirit; he acquires a taste for order, comprehends the union or the balance of powers, and collects clear practical notions on the nature of his duties and the extent of his rights.--Tocqueville (1835) Democracy in America, Translated by Henry Reeve, Esq. (1835) Vol 1. Book 1, Chapter 5, Necessity Of Examining The Condition Of The States—Part I

The quoted passage also caught Mill's attention because he quotes it verbatim in his review of the Reeve translation.* My interest here is not in the empirical basis of Tocqueville's presentation of New England.+ But in the claims about the art of government. Anticipating Dewey (and his followers), Tocqueville emphasizes that the New England township facilitates practical learning of the art of government in a relatively circumscribed political domain. The effects of such practice have a multiplicity of purported benefits: some are relate to individual character formation (e.g., a taste for public order), some involve knowledge of the structure of government (the balance of powers), some involve an education in citizenship and one's legal protections (the nature of one duties as well as acquiring the "spirit" of freedom, and extend of one's rights), and some involve practical knowledge  (how to promote liberty). What's striking here is the heterogeneous character of the consequences of engaging in the art of knowledge locally. 

Now, this heterogeneity can be partly explained by the fact that, as Tocqueville explains, while townships end up delegating a lot of tasks to particular individuals, the setting of the tasks in light of each other and in light of a whole number of practical constraints: e.g., what taxes will pay for them, do county, state, and federal laws impact these aims: how will neighboring townships respond, does the town have capacity and expertise to pursue them. The nuts and bolts deliberation is a collective enterprise. (As Mill notes ruefully, this is easier in the context of "high wages and high profits," [where] "every citizen can afford to attend to public affairs." And, surely, one of the motives for defending a basic income on democratic grounds.)

Tocqueville is unclear exactly which parts of the process are included in the art of government. But here it seems to involve (i) the setting of political aims, (ii) the assigning of positions and officers to complete these, and (iii) the execution/administration of these. And the skills required for this clearly involve training by doing it. And what makes townships so useful for this is that the issues are relatively low stakes, and tend to repeat over time and in nearby townships. So, that in any deliberative body there will be those that have experienced how the township has handled the problem before (and there may well be legal precedents around) and how others might have tackled them. In his review, Mill puts the point as follows in his review:

But the ever-increasing intervention of the people, and of all classes of the people, in their own affairs, he regards as a cardinal maxim in the modern art of government: and he believes that the nations of civilized Europe, though not all equally advanced, are all advancing, towards a condition in which there will be no distinctions of political rights, no great or very permanent distinctions of hereditary wealth; when, as there will remain no classes nor individuals capable of making head against the government, unless all are, and are fit to be, alike citizens, all will ere long be equally slaves.**

Even so, Tocqueville is quite clear that township education in the art of government is not a panacea for the more topdown art of government. As he writes in chapter 13 (in a section titled, "Instability Of The Administration In The United States"):

But the persons who conduct the administration in America can seldom afford any instruction to each other; and when they assume the direction of society, they simply possess those attainments which are most widely disseminated in the community, and no experience peculiar to themselves. Democracy, carried to its furthest limits, is therefore prejudicial to the art of government; and for this reason it is better adapted to a people already versed in the conduct of an administration than to a nation which is uninitiated in public affairs.

In this passage from chapter 13, the 'art of government' almost seems equivalent to what we would call 'public administration" (recall (iii)).  'Tocqueville's underlying point is also registered by Mill in his review. Tocqueville intimates that one of the benefits of an aristocratic political order is that it provides a ruling class leisure to prepare for and acquire the theoretical, empirical, and practical skill-set of running a great state. And one may well add that getting elected may itself not be so useful in running things. (Schumpeter, of course, picks up on this theme.) Lurking in Tocqueville's account is also a more general view that while democracy involves a raising of median and mean quality of the population along many dimensions, it also involves a certain kind of leveling, which generates the conditions of despotism (something highly salient again, and that also attracts the attention of learned commentators). It's passages like these that create the reperation of Tocqueville as a kind of aristocratic liberal.

But on Tocqueville's view this leveling should impact the quality of science and art of administration.  With regard to science, democracies have found it useful to develop lengthy apprenticeship programs and many decades of education in degreed programs to combat this problem. (And one may add that in more recent times assortative mating among scientists is also nudged by the way such education is organized.) No such equivalent exists for the running of society (except the existence of occasional political dynasties in families.) 

The final use of the 'art of government' in Democracy of America is found in the chapter summary of chapter 16. Initially, it also seems to involve the fairly narrow use of he term as public admininistration (which, of course, is a very heterogeneous category itself):

The townships, municipal bodies, and counties may therefore be looked upon as concealed break-waters, which check or part the tide of popular excitement. If an oppressive law were passed, the liberties of the people would still be protected by the means by which that law would be put in execution: the majority cannot descend to the details and (as I will venture to style them) the puerilities of administrative tyranny. Nor does the people entertain that full consciousness of its authority which would prompt it to interfere in these matters; it knows the extent of its natural powers, but it is unacquainted with the increased resources which the art of government might furnish.

The underlying point is an important one for those that defend the social utility of federalism and intermediary bodies against desposotism (and more prosaically) bad legislation. But a closer look suggests that the art of government is more than public adminsitration, if we think of it as just the skill at running things. Clearly here (iv) the art of government provides resources for active citizenship. In fact, what we might call the version involved 'civil disobedience' or 'practical resistance against authority' from below. (Passages like this tend to get ignored by friends of aristocratic liberalism.)

Notice that one of the effects of the art of government can teach citizens the extent of their own power to resist. I suspect lurking here is the idea that in a democracy, even the despotic kinds, ultimately authority rests on (informed) opinion. Informed in so far as that the art of government teaches theoretical knowledge and practical skills. And in particular it teaches citizens where in the gigantic state structure local action can be effective in slowing things down, if not halting them.

As regular readers know, yesterday (here) I suggested that in his (1861) Considerations on Representative Government, Mill divides political theory/philosophy in two. One is engaged with  the basic structure or as he puts it, the "fundamental constitution of the government." This is institutional design. (Recall this post, which discusses some of the pertinent vies of Mill's System of Logic.) And the other, is the art of government, that is, the understanding of the mode of conducting the practical business of government, including a normative version of it in liberal democracies.

Now, there is a rather prominent use of the phrase 'art of government' that I have skipped so far. So let me close with it. The final stirring paragraph of Mill's (1859) On Liberty (which also the final section V), starts with the following passage:

To determine the point at which evils, so formidable to human freedom and advancement, begin, or rather at which they begin to predominate over the benefits attending the collective application of the force of society, under its recognised chiefs, for the removal of the obstacles which stand in the way of its well-being; to secure as much of the advantages of centralized power and intelligence, as can be had without turning into governmental channels too great a proportion of the general activity—is one of the most difficult and complicated questions in the art of government. It is, in a great measure, a question of detail, in which many and various considerations must be kept in view, and no absolute rule can be laid down. But I believe that the practical principle in which safety resides, the ideal to be kept in view, the standard by which to test all arrangements intended for overcoming the difficulty, may be conveyed in these words: the greatest dissemination of power consistent with efficiency; but the greatest possible centralization of information, and diffusion of it from the centre. Thus, in municipal administration, there would be, as in the New England States, a very minute division among separate officers, chosen by the localities, of all business which is not better left to the persons directly interested; but besides this, there would be, in each department of local affairs, a central superintendence, forming a branch of the general government.++ 

The reference to "municipal administration" in "New England" suggests that he is harking back to Tocqueville (and his own discussion of Democracy in America). And, in fact, Mill is suggesting here a way to correct the problems with township governance by creating a parallel administrative central structure to be alert to problems and whose main task would be to supply information and shared practices. (Nick Cowen and I have used this passage to discuss the role of what we call the articulate state.)

Here the art of government is clearly not merely public administration. It involves considerable judgment, and the capacity to balance empirical and normative considerations. In addition, while knowledge of the mode of conducting the practical business of government is presupposed in it here, it also involves what we might call questions of mechanism design, even institutional design in light of multiple political aims (efficiency, freedom, and progress).***

Since this post has gone on, I close here and leave discussion of the significance of this semantic instability, or broad reach of the 'art of government' to another time. 

 

*Mill, John. The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XVIII - Essays on Politics and Society Part I. University of Toronto Press, 1977, p. 63.  

+The use of 'native' to refer to descendants of settler colonialists may also raise some eyebrows.

**Mill, John. The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XVIII - Essays on Politics and Society Part I. University of Toronto Press, 1977, p. 159.

++ Mill, John. The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XVIII - Essays on Politics and Society Part I. University of Toronto Press, 1977, pp. 309-310.

***In an early work Mill put the 'art of government' in this wider contect: 

This branch of science, whether we prefer to call it social economy, speculative politics, or the natural history of society, presupposes the whole science of the nature of the individual mind; since all the laws of which the latter science takes cognizance are brought into play in a state of society, and the truths of the social science are but statements of the manner in which those simple laws take effect in complicated circumstances. Pure mental philosophy, therefore, is an essential part, or preliminary, of political philosophy. The science of social economy embraces every part of man’s nature, in so far as influencing the conduct or condition of man in society; and therefore may it be termed speculative politics, as being the scientific foundation of practical politics, or the art of government, of which the art of legislation is a part.--Mill "On the Definition of Political Economy; and on the Method of Investigation Proper To It." in Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy

Comments

[rsm]

I wonder what de Tocqueville would think of a public state (Wa in US) Forest Practices Board meetng I attended yesterday, in which an "aristocratic" small forest landowner used "full consciousness of [his] authority" to force the Board to reconvene privately by refusing to leave the Public Comment table, thus preventng me of the opportunity to comment myself?

Also, regarding a "people already versed in the conduct of an administration", don't these career public administrators love to jibber-jabber about jibber-jabber? (Based on observations over the past couple years trying to save trees from logging by commenting in public meetings ...)