Tocqueville's Nightmare: The Administrative State Emerges in America, 1900-1940

By Daniel R. Ernst

Book Overview

Alexis de Tocqueville once warned that "insufferable despotism" would prevail if America ever acquired a national administrative state. Today's Tea Partiers evidently believe that Tocqueville's nightmare came true during the New Deal when radicals created vast bureaucracies that continue to trample on individual freedom. In Tocqueville's Nightmare, Daniel R. Ernst destroys this ahistorical and simplistic narrative. He shows that reformers wanted to purge government of corruption rather than create a socialist utopia. Indeed, they built the principles of individual rights, limited government, and due process into the administrative state.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0190465875
• ISBN13: 9780190465872
• Release Date: May 2016
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.2"