all that is necessary is to persuade the State to make a suitable use of this power."[1] The physiocrats seemed ready to sacrifice individuals to the common weal; they had no great love of liberty, and thought the idea of an equipoise of powers absurd; they hoped to convert the State; their system is defined by Tocqueville as "a democratic despotism"; the Government would have been in theory the representative of everybody, controlled by an enlightened public opinion; practically it was an absolute master.[2] One of the things which most astonished Tocqueville in the course of his studies of the Old Régime is the admiration felt by the physiocrats for China, which appeared to them as the type of good government, because in that country there were only valets and clerks carefully catalogued and chosen by competition.[3]
Since the Revolution there has been such an upheaval of ideas that we have considerable difficulty in understanding correctly the conceptions of our fathers.[4] The capitalist economic system has thrown full light on the extraordinary power of the individual unaided by the State; the confidence which the men of the eighteenth century had in the industrial capacities of the State seems puerile to everybody who has studied production elsewhere than in the insipid books of the sociologists, which still preserve very carefully the cult for the blunders of the past; the law of nature has become an inexhaustible subject of banter for people who have the slightest
- ↑ Tocqueville, L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution, p. 100.
- ↑ Tocqueville, op. cit. pp. 235–240.
- ↑ Tocqueville, op. cit. p. 241.
- ↑ In the history of judicial ideas in France, full consideration must be given to the dividing up of landed property, which, by multiplying the independent heads of productive units, contributed more to the spread of judicial ideas among the masses than was ever done among the literate classes by the finest treatises on philosophy.
of the eighteenth century thought that the State had the right to do everything, since it was the expression of "reason," and no single force could oppose the action of this "reason."
