Credo Ut Intelligam

Toqueville on Industrialism and Aristocracy

This time, I'll translate.

When an artisan gives himself over ceaselessly and entirely to the construction of one object, he achieves a remarkable dexterity in that work. But at the same time he loses the more general skill of applying his mind to the management of his work. He becomes, each day, more useful and less industrious. The man is degraded as the work is perfected.

What must we think of a man who has spent twenty years of his life in making pin heads? What application of that marvelous human intelligence, which has often moved the world, can he look forward to, except to seek for a better way to make pin heads?

When a laborer has spent a considerable part of his existence in this way, his thought is forever restricted to the object of his daily labors; his body has acquired certain fixed habits which cannot be gotten rid of. In a word, he is no longer master of himself, but only of the the work that he has chosen. In vain have laws and customs taken care to break all the barriers that surround such a man and to open for him on all sides a thousand different roads to fortune; an industrial theory more powerful than customs and laws has bound him to a trade and often to a locale that he cannot leave. It has assigned him a certain place in society from which he cannot escape. In the midst of universal movement he is afflicted with immobility.

Insofar as the principle of the division of labor receives a more complete application, the worker becomes weaker, more limited, and more dependent. The progress of the craft is the regress of the craftsman. On the other hand, insofar as it becomes more clear that the products of industry are so much more perfect and so much less expensive, and insofar as the business is bigger and capital more expansive, the wealthy and savy are drawn to exploit those industries that, previously, had been the provenance of rude and uneducated artisans. They are drawn by the grandeur of the efforts needed and the immensity of the results to be obtained.

Thus, while industrial science continually demeans the class of workers, it raises the class of masters. While the worker's intellect is constrained more and more to the study of a single detail, the master every day surveys a vast organization, and his mind expands as much as the worker's contracts. Soon, the latter will need only physical force without intelligence; the former has need of science, even of genius, to succeed. The one comes to resemble, more and more, the administrator of a great empire, the other a mere animal.

The master and the worker then have nothing in common, and they differ more and more each day. They touch each other only as the two ends of a long chain. Each occupies a place that is made for him and that he cannot leave. One is in a continual, narrow, and necessitous dependence on the other, and seems born to obey, while the other seems born to command.

What is this if not aristocracy?

Conditions become more and more equal in the nation at large, the demand for manufactured objects grows and becomes more general, and the cheap prices that put these objects within the reach of middling fortunes become a great element of success. So it comes about that the more wealthy and savy dedicate their wealth and knowledge to industry and to seeking, by opening great factories and strictly dividing labor, to satisfy the new desires that are manifesting themselves everywhere.

Thus, insofar as the mass of the nation turns to democracy, the particular class that is is occupied with industry becomes more aristocratic. Men come to be more and more alike in the one and more and more different in the other, and inequality grows in the industrial microcosm as much as it is diminished in society at large. In this way aristocracy seems to arise naturally out of the very heart of democracy.

But this aristocracy is not like those that came before.

First, since this applies only to industry, and only to a few of the industrial professions, it represents an exception, a monster, in the larger society. The little aristocratic societies that certain industries compose in the midst of the immense democracy of our day, contain, like the great aristocratic societies of ancient times, some very rich men and an poor multitude. The poor have hardly any opportunity to improve their condition and become rich, but the rich are always becoming poor, or else leaving the world of business after having realized their profits. Thus the membership of the lower class is mostly fixed, while the membership of the wealthy class is not. Indeed, although there may be wealthy individuals, there really is no wealthy class; for those individuals have no esprit de corp, no common objects, and no common traditions or hopes. So there are members, but no body.

It is not only that the rich have no solid unity among themselves; there is also no true connection between the poor and the rich. They are not settled, in perpetuity, near each other; their interests at each moment connect and separate them. The laborer is dependent on the masters in general, but not on any particular master. The two meet for business and have no further knowledge of each other, and while they touch each other at that one point, they remain at great distance at every other point. The business owner asks nothing of the laborer except his labor, and the laborer cares only for his wages. The one does not in any way engage to protect or defend the other, and they are not linked together with any permanence, either by habit or by duty.

The industrial aristocrats almost never live anywhere near the population of employees that they manage; their aim is not to govern them but only to make use of them.

Such an aristocracy cannot have the admiration of those they employ. Even if they should get it momentarily, it will soon be lost. They do not know how to will and to act.

The landed aristocrats of ages past were obliged by law, or felt themselves obliged by custom, to come to the aid of their servants and to alleviate their sufferings. But the industrial aristocrats of our day, after having impoverished and dehumanized those they make use of, deliver them in their time of crisis over to public charity for their sustenance. This is the natural result of what was observed previously. The worker and the master have frequent contact, but they have no true community.

--Alexis de Toqueville, de la Democratie en Amerique, vol. 2, deuxieme partie, chapitre 20.