On Tocqueville, Pauperism, and Employee Ownership

There seems to be two rather different philosophies of aid to development and poverty relief. (1) The progressive/social-democratic approach is for the government or aid agencies to do more and more good things for people. (2) The classical-liberal approach is to change the underlying conditions so that people are empowered to do good things for themselves. In this paper, we analyze Alexis de Tocqueville’s approach to these questions in his First Memoir and his (unfinished) Second Memoir on Pauperism.