The economic forces were the clearest. Industry‘exposes [men] to great
and sudden alternations of abundance and misery...and can also com-
promise the health and even the life of those who profitfromorengage
in it’(DA, II.4.v). As a result,‘the industrial class needs to be regulated,
supervised, and restrained more than other classes, and it is natural for
the prerogatives of government to grow along with it’(DA, II.4.v). At the
same time:
As a nation becomes more industrial, it feels a proportionately greater need for
roads, canals, ports and other works of a semi-public nature.... The obvious
tendency for all sovereigns nowadays is to assume sole responsibility for undertak-
ings of this kind, thereby constricting the independence of the populations they
rule more and more each day. (DA, II.4.v)But there was a social dynamic too. Fully exposed to the vagaries of fortune,
each individual would, from time to time, inevitably‘feel the need of outside
help’; but he could not‘expect to receive it from any of [his equals] because
they are all powerless and cold hearted’(DA, II.4.iii). He therefore‘naturally
turns his attention to the one immense being that alone stands out amid the
universal abasement’(DA, II.4.iii), that is, the state.
Finally, a turn to the state was consistent with the nature of reasoning in
democratic societies. In such societies, individuals were neither tied to, nor
identified with, concrete others but with the intangible notion of a political
entity; it was therefore easy for them to conceive of relying on a remote and
abstract structure, such as the state, to protect and enhance their needs.
All that could prove fatal to democracy. Equality bred conformism, partly
because each individual could not readily disassociate himself from a‘public
opinion’he helped to create, but mainly because isolation and the ever-
present fear of rejection crushed all resistance,‘[pervading] the souls even of
those whose interest might inspire them to resist it’and‘[altering] their
judgment even as it subjugates their will’(DA, II.3.v). The result, as J. S. Mill
put it in pursuing his reflections onDemocracy in America, was that, because
each man‘[is] so lost in the crowd, that though he depends more and more on
opinion, he is apt to depend less and less on well-grounded opinion’, the
quality of decision-making would deteriorate, and the willingness to stand
alone against error with it (Kaledin 2011, p. 232).
Far from being self-correcting, opinions, no matter howflawed they might
be, could therefore become self-perpetuating and remain dominant long after
their fallacies were obvious.
‘When an opinion takes hold in a democratic nation and establishes itself in
a majority of minds, it becomes self-sustaining and can perpetuate itself
without effort, because nobody will attack it’, Tocqueville wrote (DA, II.3.
xxi), anticipating much current research (Kuran 1997). Indeed, under the
Henry Ergas