Vol. 42, No. 09
The Wild Herb and the Garden Plant: de Tocqueville’s Warning Against Socialism
AT A GLANCE
• Alexis de Tocqueville warned that “centralization and socialism are natives of the same soil.”
• He described them as the “wild herb” and the “garden-plant.”
• Socialism does not invade a free country like an army crossing a frontier; it sprouts.
• Socialism sprouts in soil that has been cultivated by the centralization
of power.
In 1856, French diplomat and historian Alexis de Tocqueville published a book that was not, he insisted, a history of the French Revolution. It was an autopsy. Napoleon III had seized power, the Second Republic was dead, and the author of Democracy in America had withdrawn from public life to the archives of Tours, where he read the correspondence of intendants (administrators), the registers of royal councils, and the cahiers (notebooks) of 1789 — all of which made up essentially the last will and testament of a dying society. He wrote of what he found there in a book that should be required reading for every American who believes socialism is a novelty, a foreign import, or a passing fever of the young. The book is The Old Regime and the Revolution, and its diagnosis is as fresh as this morning’s headlines.
Socialism Is Older Than Its Salesmen
De Tocqueville wastes no time demolishing the conceit, common in his day and universal in ours, that collectivism is a modern discovery. “It is generally believed that the destructive theories known by the name of socialism are of modern origin,” he writes. “This is an error. These theories are coeval with the earliest economists.” Then he provides the evidence. In 1755, a full generation before the Bastille fell, an obscure Frenchman named Étienne-Gabriel Morelly published the Code de la Nature, laying out the entire program that would later march under red banners:
Nothing belongs wholly to any one. Property is detestable, and any one who attempts to re-establish it shall be imprisoned for life, as a dangerous madman and an enemy of humanity. Every citizen shall be kept, and maintained, and supplied with work at the public expense. All produce shall be gathered into public garners, to be distributed to citizens for their subsistence. All cities shall be built on the same plan; all private residences shall be alike. All children shall be taken from their families at five years of age, and educated together on a uniform plan.
Community of property. Guaranteed employment. Universal provision. Uniform housing. State custody of children. Morelly wrote the book; Marx merely added footnotes. De Tocqueville’s comment on this catalog of horrors lands like a gavel: “This book reads as if it had been written yesterday.” He wrote that sentence 170 years ago. It has not aged a day.
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