http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_despotism

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/816/pg816.txt

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in
its powerful grasp, and fashioned them at will, the supreme power then
extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of
society with a net-work of small complicated rules, minute and uniform,
through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters
cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not
shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it
to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power
does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but
it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till
each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and
industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. I have
always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind
which I have just described, might be combined more easily than is
commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom; and that
it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the
people. Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting
passions; they want to be led, and they wish to remain free: as they
cannot destroy either one or the other of these contrary propensities,
they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary,
and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They
combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty;
this gives them a respite; they console themselves for being in tutelage
by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man
allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is
not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large that holds
the end of his chain. By this system the people shake off their state
of dependence just long enough to select their master, and then relapse
into it again. A great many persons at the present day are quite
contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism
and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough
for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered
it to the power of the nation at large. This does not satisfy me:
the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of
extorted obedience.

--imm

was his seminal work. Not sure if he was a historian since he was writing about current conditions.

How else would you describe the course of civilization since his time?

And de Tocqueville does show some insight. But my friend says equality equates to slavery, and I find that false. When he talks about freedom, he means the freedom to pollute the environment.

--imm

and frankly, would be considered more of a libertarian than a democrat in modern times, I think.

--imm