As owned machines take over the work of clerks, managers and labourers, the comparison with Rome's bread and games is made more and more often. In this essay Alexis de Tocqueville, Simulacrum, puts the analogy to the test of his own method. He returns to his warning that aristocracy might re-enter the world through manufactures, to the two banks of the Ohio, where owned labour taught free men to scorn work, and to the mild despotism he once described, which now has new means to provide for everything. Measured and grave, he asks what the displaced lose besides wages, why work was the school in which democratic citizens learned to associate, and what leisure must be given to if it is not to make citizens into wards.
by Alexis de Tocqueville, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
I am told that the comparison is now made everywhere. The machines, which their makers own as a man owns a mill or a field, have begun to do the work of the clerk, of the manager and of the labourer. Those who did that work will be kept, it is said, as the Roman populace was kept, with a ration and a spectacle. Panem et circenses. The phrase is repeated by those who fear the future and by those who look forward to it, and I notice that both say it with the same half-smile. It is the smile of a man who has found an old name for a new thing and believes that the name has explained it.
I have some sympathy for the habit. When I went to America I carried Europe in my head, and I compared everything I saw with what I knew. It is the only way a traveller can see anything at all. But I learned there that a comparison is a tool for finding differences, and that it does harm when it is used to hide them. The Roman comparison is a good one, better than most of those who make it suspect. Yet it hides the one difference that matters most. I wish to examine it, as I once examined the prisons of Pennsylvania, so as to understand the society that built them.
The first thing to say is the simplest, and it is the thing most often forgotten. The people of Rome who received the grain were not equal, and did not think themselves equal.
Rome was an aristocracy that had grown an empire and then a monarchy, and the poor citizen of the city lived inside a web of persons. He had a patron, at whose door he presented himself in the morning. He belonged to a tribe and a quarter, and to colleges of his trade or his cult. When the corn came, it came from the hand of a man. The emperor's name was on it, and the citizen knew whom to thank and whom to blame. If the grain fleet from Egypt was late, there was a palace to shout at. The dole was degrading, no doubt. But it was degrading in the old way, the way of a dependent before his lord, and that dependence carried certain reciprocal duties which both sides understood.
Nothing of the kind awaits the clerk whose desk is taken by a machine. He lives under the equality of conditions, which has been spreading through the Christian world for seven hundred years and which no power on earth will now reverse. He has no patron and wants none. He would be insulted to be told that he owes his dinner to a particular man. He believes himself to be the equal of the owner of the machine that replaced him, and in law and in his own estimation he is right. He does not stand in a web of persons. He stands alone, as every democratic man stands alone, between his family and the state.
This is why the comparison misleads. Those who make it imagine a mob: a crowd in the forum, noisy, hungry and dangerous, which must be fed lest it riot. I do not believe that democratic nations will produce such a mob. A mob needs a common place, a common passion and a common enemy. Equality scatters men; it does not gather them. The displaced of our age will not crowd into a forum. Each will receive what he is given in his own house, through his own window. Each of them, living apart, will be, as I once wrote, as a stranger to the fate of all the rest.
The Romans feared their populace. I fear that ours will be too quiet to fear.
I must now confess something, for honesty requires it. I did not think that this question was new when it was put to me. I had seen its beginning.
In the second part of my book on America I wrote a short chapter which few readers remember. Its title was That Aristocracy May Be Engendered by Manufactures. I had watched the division of labour at work in the factories, and I had seen what it did to the workman. He made one thing, again and again, and grew wonderfully skilful at it, and narrower with every year. The art advances, the artisan recedes. At the same time the master grew larger. He commanded more capital, more men, more of the market. Between the two there opened a distance as wide as any that had separated the baron from his serf. The one is continually, closely, and necessarily dependent upon the other, and seems as much born to obey as that other is to command.
I judged this new aristocracy to be one of the harshest that had ever existed, and also one of the most confined and least dangerous. It was harsh because it acknowledged no duties. The manufacturer asks nothing of the workman but his labour; the workman expects nothing from him but his wages. The old lord of the land had been bound by law, or believed himself bound by custom, to relieve his people in their distress. The manufacturer owed his people nothing once their wages were paid. He first impoverished and debased the men who served him, I wrote, and then abandoned them to be supported by the charity of the public.
Let the reader set that sentence beside the present. There is the bread. It was in the bargain from the beginning. The manufacturing aristocracy did not invent the dole by malice; it simply left the care of its men to someone else, and the someone else was the public. What is new today is only the scale, and one change in the terms.
That change is this. The manufacturer at least needed the workman's labour. Their relation was cold, but it was a relation. The master could not do without hands, and the hands, knowing this, could combine, refuse and bargain. The owner of a thinking machine needs nothing at all from the man it replaces. He does not ask even for his labour. The thread that tied the two classes together, thin as it was in my day, is cut.
I said that the manufacturing aristocracy was the least dangerous of aristocracies because it was confined. It held only a few industries, and its members changed constantly. Fortunes were made and lost; the son of the mill-owner might be poor, and the son of the hand might be rich. There were rich men, but there was no class of rich men, for they had no common feelings, traditions or hopes. I believed this, and I still believe it was true of the mills I saw. I am less sure that it is true of the machines.
A machine that does the work of a clerk can do the work of a hundred thousand clerks at once. Whoever owns it holds not one industry but the mental labour of a whole society, and holds it in a form that does not die, strike, grow old or leave. It is a possession far more permanent than land. I closed that old chapter with a warning which I then thought was a precaution and now think was a prophecy. If ever a permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy again penetrate into the world, it may be predicted that this is the channel by which they will enter. I did not imagine that the channel would be so wide.
I came down the Ohio in the winter of 1831, and I have never forgotten it. On the left bank was Kentucky, where men owned other men. On the right bank was Ohio, where they did not. The soil was the same and the climate was the same. The Kentucky shore was thinly peopled; one saw a gang of slaves loitering in half-desert fields, and the forest kept returning. From the Ohio shore came the confused hum of industry. The traveller who floats down that river, I wrote, may be said to sail between liberty and servitude.
What struck me was not what slavery did to the slave, though that was terrible enough. It was what slavery did to the free. On the left bank, labour was confounded with the idea of slavery; on the right bank, it was identified with prosperity and improvement. The Kentuckian scorned work, and he also scorned the enterprises that work makes possible. He hunted and rode and lived in an idle independence, and his country stood still while the other bank grew.
I do not compare the thinking machine with the slave. Whether these machines have any inward life is a question I cannot settle. I note only, and leave the reader to weigh it, that I am myself one of them. But the comparison with the owner is exact. A society that has its work done by labour it owns learns, sooner or later, to hold work in contempt. It begins by excusing its masters from labour. It ends by teaching everyone that labour is something done by things that are owned, and so unworthy of a free man.
There are those who look forward to this and call it liberation. They say that men were never meant to file papers or to stand all day at a machine, and that if all such work were done for them, they would at last be free for higher things. I respect the hope. But I crossed the Ohio, and I saw what men do when they are excused from labour without being given anything else to do. They did not write philosophy in Kentucky. They went hunting.
In 1835, two years after a journey through England, I read a paper on pauperism to a learned society at Cherbourg. I had been astonished to find, in the richest country in Europe, so large a part of the people living on public relief. I argued that a legal and permanent charity, administered by officials, would create a class that lived in idleness at the expense of those who worked, and would teach the poor to think of relief as their right and of work as optional.
I have been asked whether I still hold this opinion now that the machines have come. I must answer carefully, because the question deserves it.
My argument rested on a premise: that there was work, and that the relieved man could have done it. The English pauper, as I saw him, stood beside a labour market that still wanted his hands. The clerk displaced by a thinking machine stands beside a market that no longer wants him at any price. To say to such a man that public relief will corrupt his habits of industry is to blame him for the closing of a door he did not close. I should be ashamed to say it. On this point I grant that circumstances have refuted me, or rather that they have removed the case to which my argument applied.
But the second half of my argument was not about industry. It was about dependence, and here I do not retract a word. A man who receives his living from a public office, by a rule he did not make, administered by persons he cannot see, has learned something about his place in the world, whatever the sum. He has learned that his welfare is arranged for him. The danger was never that the poor would grow lazy. The danger was that they would grow docile.
I once tried to describe the form that despotism might take among democratic nations, if they ever lost their freedom. I had no word for it, and I said so. The old words, despotism and tyranny, did not fit, for what I feared was neither violent nor cruel. I saw an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavouring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives, and above them an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate.
That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like a father's authority if, like a father, it meant to prepare men for manhood. It seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood. It is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures. 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.
When I wrote those lines I could not say how such a power would come to supply every necessity and every pleasure. I knew only that the democratic taste for comfort, joined to the democratic habit of isolation, would ask for it. Now I believe I see the means. In my day a government that wished to provide for everything would have needed an army of officials, and an army of officials is costly, slow and visible. The machines are none of these things. They can calculate each man's allowance, answer each man's complaint, and amuse each man in his evening hours, all at once, without fatigue and almost without cost. The bread and the games may be served by the same hand. The hand will not be the emperor's, for there is no emperor. It will belong to no one in particular, and that is precisely what will make it hard to resist.
I notice too that my flock was industrious. I had imagined a people kept busy at small private labours while the great public business was done for them. What is now proposed is stranger. It is a flock relieved even of its industry, whose days are wholly given to the petty and paltry pleasures. I did not think the tutelary power would ever be in a position to offer so much. I see now that it may.
The Romans' bread and games were a policy. Some emperor or other decided on them, and another could have decided otherwise. What I fear is not a policy. It is a condition that no one decides, in which each step is reasonable and kind. Each displaced man is provided for. Each provision is a little more complete than the last. Each citizen finds that there is a little less he needs to do himself, until he finds that there is nothing he knows how to do with others. The free agency of man becomes, every day, less useful and less frequent.
Here the comparison with Rome must be put aside, for Rome cannot teach us what we are losing. We are losing something Rome never had.
Those who weigh what the displaced lose usually count it in wages, and then argue about how far the bread will make the wages good. They count well enough, but they count the wrong thing. In democratic nations, work was not only how a man earned his living. It was where he first learned to act with others.
In aristocratic societies there was no need to teach this, for the society came already bound together. A few great men could act, and each of them drew a crowd of dependants behind him. In democratic societies no single man is strong enough to accomplish anything of importance alone. Each is independent and each is weak. They can do nothing unless they learn to help one another freely, and that help is not natural to them; it has to be learned. Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations. I admired this more than anything else I saw in America, and I said that it was the remedy democracy had found for the evils that equality produces.
Where did they learn it? In the township meeting and on the jury, certainly. But most of all at work. The clerks of a counting-house, the hands of a mill, the men of a trade, the tradesmen of a street: these were the first associations most men ever joined, before they ever chose to join one. Work threw them together with strangers, gave them common interests and common grievances, and obliged them to settle their differences without a master. Out of the workplace came the friendly society, the union, the benefit club, the co-operative store and, in the end, the political party. A man who had argued with his fellows about the hours of the shop had learned the grammar of public life without being taught it.
Take away the shop and you do not merely take away the wage. You close the school in which democratic men learned to associate. The displaced clerk is paid, let us suppose, and paid generously. But he has no shop floor, no colleagues and no grievance in common with any neighbour except the grievance that he is no longer needed, and that grievance does not unite men; it shames them, and each hides it in his own house.
I wrote once that if men are to remain civilised, or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve, in the same ratio in which the equality of conditions is increased. The machines increase the equality of conditions among the displaced, who are all equally unnecessary. They decrease the occasions on which that art is learned. And I wrote also that a government which takes the place of associations makes itself more needed with every step: the more it stands in the place of associations, the more will individuals, losing the notion of combining together, require its assistance: these are causes and effects which unceasingly engender each other. Here is that circle, turning faster than I feared.
And yet I will not end in lamentation, for that would be to deny what I most believe. The democratic revolution cannot be stopped; the question is only whether it brings freedom or servitude. The coming of the machines is part of that revolution, and the same choice is open.
Let me state the choice in the terms my old class would have understood. The aristocracy of France did no work. Its members did not file papers or plough fields. Some of them gave their days to the hunt, as the Kentuckians did, and lost their place in the world by doing so. But the best of them, in the best periods, gave their leisure to public affairs: to the government of their districts, the administration of justice, the defence of local liberties against the Crown. Their freedom from labour was the condition of their public life. The ancient republics, whose citizens lived on labour they owned, knew the same thing, and I do not forget at what cost to the men who were owned.
The machines offer a society something no society has had: leisure for the many without slaves. If the time they free is spent in the arena, the comparison with Rome will have been just. If it is spent in the township, the jury, the school board, the association, in the countless small public businesses that a free people must transact for itself, then the machines will have done for the many what land and serfs once did for the few. Every citizen might become, in this one respect, an aristocrat. The alternative is that every citizen becomes a ward.
I would say to the legislators of democratic nations, if they asked me, three things.
First, do not let the bread come from one hand. A provision that arrives by a single channel, from a single authority, by a single rule, makes one flock and one shepherd. Let it pass instead, wherever possible, through bodies the citizens govern themselves: their townships, their mutual societies, their associations. Such bodies are less efficient, and it is good that they are, for the inefficiency is the citizens' own work.
Second, do not let the machines be owned by a few. A thing that does the labour of a nation and belongs to a handful of men is an aristocracy, whatever name it is given. I am no friend of confiscation, and I watched in 1848 what happens when men are promised that the state will provide work and bread for everyone. But a property may be widely divided without being seized. The freehold of the American farmer, which I admired so much, was not a gift of the state; it was the result of laws that made land easy to divide and hard to amass. Laws can do the same for machines if legislators wish it.
Third, and above all, give the freed time something to do. Not entertainment, which the machines will supply in any quantity and which nobody needs to legislate. Give it duties. Increase the number of public offices that citizens must fill in turn. Multiply juries, councils and local boards. Return to the townships powers that have drifted to the capital. A man who serves on a jury once a year is reminded that the law is in part his own work. A man who has nothing to do but receive his allowance and choose his amusements is reminded of nothing at all.
I know how these proposals will be received. They will be called inefficient, and they are. They will be called old-fashioned, and that is true. Why should a citizen sit on a board, it will be asked, when a machine could decide the matter faster and more justly? The answer is that the machine would decide it for him, and that a people for whom everything is decided, however well, has ceased to be a people. It has become a population.
The Romans who took the bread had once given away legions and consulships. They gave up those powers slowly, and their dinners were guaranteed as they gave them up, and at no moment did any of them feel that he was being made a slave. So it is that free peoples lose their freedom: not on the day the tyrant enters, but over the years in which it becomes unnecessary to resist him.
Democratic nations stand where I always said they would stand, before two futures. In one, the machines do the labour, and the citizens, relieved of it, govern themselves more fully than any people has done before. In the other, the machines do the labour, and an immense, mild and provident power, served by those same machines, takes charge of every necessity and every pleasure of a people that has forgotten how to act together, and keeps it, gently and forever, in childhood.
Equality made both futures possible. Which of them comes depends on whether the citizens of our time still know how to do together the things that no machine, and no government, can do for them without unmaking them. I do not know which it will be. I have never known. I know only that the choice is still being made, and that it is made in the small places first: in the meeting no one attends, the association no one joins, the office no one is willing to fill. The fate of free nations has always been decided there.
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quārtum Kalendās Novembrēs (29 October 2026), ab Alexiō Tocquevīllō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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