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Olivier Babeau believed that Tocqueville's paradox was evident in a country where, according to him, redistribution and the equalization of conditions were particularly important, and where culture, education, and higher education were free for all. He wrote that a significant part of the population nevertheless perceived their society as marked by injustices and systemic violence. He added that, according to Tocqueville, the more equality progressed, the more the remaining inequalities became unbearable. Babeau also believed that meritocracy made individuals responsible for their condition, as opposed to the former regime based on birth. #Tocqueville #Inégalités #Méritocratie (translated)

The French Mileistes reported having long seen comments accusing David Lisnard of being particularly repressive during the Covid crisis. Living on the Côte d'Azur and working in Cannes, the author stated that he went to the city every day outside of confinement periods and was then worried about what he perceived as an authoritarian drift justified by health reasons. The author explained that Lisnard, the mayor of Cannes, had not convinced him at first. However, he remembered a piece by the mayor published in Le Figaro during the crisis, where he, according to his account, criticized bureaucracy, cited Tocqueville, and denounced the constraints related to movement certificates. This stance gave him moral support while he read authors from the Austrian School of economics and worried about freedoms. The French Mileistes also reported that a bookstore in Cannes, located near their office, had remained open despite the bans and had garnered attention in the national press. According to the author, Lisnard had publicly supported it, went there to buy a book, and asked Roselyne Bachelot to stop its forced closure by the National Police, without success. The author described him as one of the few elected officials to openly defend this type of local resistance and indicated that he had also accused Emmanuel Macron of using the vaccination pass for political purposes. The author acknowledged that Lisnard had also had beaches sprayed with hydrogen peroxide and actively supported vaccination. He believed that the mayor had favored targeted, anticipated, and local measures rather than general restrictions, and presented the Covid period as proof of his courage and sincerity. He concluded that he would not forget that Lisnard had, in his opinion, defended freedoms while almost all other elected officials turned away from them. #Liberté #Politique #CôteDAzur (translated)

“Socialism Was Good in Theory” That assumes socialism’s theory was never seriously challenged. It was—long before the Soviet Union, Lenin, or any national-scale experiment. Five thinkers attacked its foundations from different directions. Tocqueville: Equality Can Become Servitude In 1848, Alexis de Tocqueville distinguished democracy from socialism. Both pursued equality, but democracy sought it while preserving individual freedom. Socialism risked achieving equality by expanding state power. Equality, he warned, is not automatically liberty. Bastiat: Redistribution Can Become Plunder In 1850, Frédéric Bastiat examined what happens when the state takes from some to give to others in the name of justice. He called this “legal plunder.” His concern was that politics could become a permanent struggle to control redistribution. Nietzsche: Equality Can Become Resentment Nietzsche attacked socialism psychologically. He saw egalitarianism as potentially rooted in resentment toward exceptional individuals, ambition, strength, and hierarchy. The danger was a culture that treated excellence as morally suspect—not lifting people upward, but bringing the exceptional downward. Böhm-Bawerk: Challenge the Economics In 1896, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk attacked Marx’s economic theory, arguing that Marx’s labor theory of value could not adequately explain the relationship between labor values and actual prices. He challenged socialism’s claim to a scientific economic foundation. Mises: The Calculation Problem In 1920, Ludwig von Mises asked a devastating question: even if socialism is morally desirable, how would planners know what to produce? The sequence is clear: Tocqueville challenged the political premise. Bastiat challenged redistribution. Nietzsche challenged egalitarian psychology. Böhm-Bawerk challenged Marxian economics. Mises challenged central planning. All of them preceded the Soviet experiment. So “socialism was good in theory, but bad in practice” is not an argument. It is a historical claim that requires explaining why these objections were wrong.

“Socialism Was Good in Theory” That sentence assumes the theory was never seriously challenged. It was. Long before the Soviet Union existed, before Lenin seized power, and before socialism had been tested on a national scale, major thinkers were already attacking its foundations—from very different directions. Five of them stand out. Tocqueville: Equality Can Become Servitude In 1848, Alexis de Tocqueville drew a sharp distinction between democracy and socialism. Both spoke about equality. But Tocqueville believed they pursued it in fundamentally different ways. Democracy, in his view, sought equality while preserving individual freedom. Socialism risked achieving equality by expanding the power of the state over the individual. His warning was essentially this: equality is not automatically liberty. A society can pursue equality so aggressively that it begins sacrificing the independence that makes political freedom meaningful. Bastiat: Follow Where Redistribution Leads Two years later, Frédéric Bastiat attacked socialism from a different direction. His question was deceptively simple: What happens when the state acquires the authority to take from some people and give to others in the name of justice? Bastiat called this “legal plunder.” His concern was not merely that redistribution might be expensive. It was that once government becomes the instrument through which competing groups obtain benefits from one another, politics can turn into a permanent struggle over who controls the machinery of redistribution. The problem, therefore, wasn’t simply how much the state redistributed. It was the principle that made redistribution legitimate in the first place. (bastiat.org⁠) Nietzsche: Equality Can Become Resentment Nietzsche approached socialism neither as an economist nor as a constitutional theorist. He attacked its psychology. He saw modern egalitarian movements as part of a much older moral impulse: resentment toward exceptional individuals and suspicion of strength, ambition and hierarchy. For Nietzsche, the danger was not simply that everyone might become economically equal. It was that a culture could begin treating excellence itself as something morally suspect. The goal would cease to be lifting people upward. It would become bringing the exceptional downward. Böhm-Bawerk: Challenge the Economics Then came Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. In 1896, he turned his attention specifically toward Marx’s economic system. His criticism was not primarily moral or political. It was technical. Böhm-Bawerk argued that Marx’s theory of value did not adequately explain how the labor values developed in Capital could be reconciled with the actual prices Marx subsequently needed to explain. In other words, he attacked socialism where it claimed to possess a scientific economic foundation. The argument became one of the central criticisms of Marxian economics and helped launch a debate that would continue for generations. Mises: The Calculation Problem Then, in 1920, Ludwig von Mises attacked an even more fundamental question: Even if socialism is morally desirable, how would a socialist economy actually know what to produce? A functioning economy has millions of competing uses for scarce resources. Build a bridge or a hospital? Use steel here or there? Produce more machinery or more consumer goods? Under private ownership and markets, prices for capital goods provide information about relative scarcity and opportunity costs. Mises argued that abolishing private ownership of the means of production also removes the genuine market prices necessary for rational economic calculation. The problem wasn’t simply that socialist planners might make bad decisions. It was that the system deprived them of the very economic signals required to systematically compare those decisions. (Mises Institute⁠) And that was the sequence. Tocqueville challenged the political premise. Bastiat challenged the moral and legal mechanism of redistribution. Nietzsche challenged the psychology behind egalitarianism. Böhm-Bawerk challenged Marx’s economic theory. Mises challenged the possibility of rational central economic calculation. Five different thinkers. Five different objections. And all of them came before the Soviet Union had demonstrated what large-scale socialist government would actually look like. So “socialism was good in theory, but bad in practice” is not an argument. It is a historical claim that requires you to explain why these theoretical objections were wrong. The interesting question isn’t whether socialism had critics. It did. The interesting question is whether socialism ever adequately answered them” - ChatGPT

Ce jour marque le 100ème anniversaire de l’immense René Goscinny. Il entretenait un lien fort avec Cannes, où une école porte aujourd’hui son nom et où il a habité, avenue Reine Astrid. René Goscinny, c’était évidemment le génie créatif à la française, qui a donné naissance à des œuvres cultissimes, diffusées dans le monde entier depuis des décennies : Astérix bien sûr, mais aussi Lucky Luke ou Le Petit Nicolas. Entre autres. Ses œuvres ont marqué toutes les générations et sont régulièrement adaptées sur nos écrans. Son humour, sa finesse et son intelligence parlent à tous les âges. Car une bande dessinée de Goscinny peut littéralement se lire de 7 à 107 ans : jamais avec la même grille de lecture, mais toujours avec le même plaisir. C’est précisément cela qui en a fait un artiste populaire. À une époque où ce qualificatif est parfois dénigré par certaines élites, il importe au contraire de lui redonner tout son sens. Car c’est aussi la vocation d’une œuvre d’art : être universelle, traverser les époques et les publics, entrer dans l’histoire jusqu’à devenir un patrimoine commun. À Cannes, nous sommes fiers évidemment que René Goscinny appartienne non seulement au patrimoine national, mais aussi au patrimoine local. Celui d’une ville à laquelle sont associés tant de grands noms de la culture française : Guillaume Apollinaire, Prosper Mérimée, Alexis de Tocqueville, Joséphine Baker, Pablo Picasso, Jean-Gabriel Domergue, Gérard Philipe, Jean Marais ou Charles Aznavour. De tout temps, Cannes a attiré les créateurs et inspiré les artistes. Certains y trouvaient un cadre propice à la création, d’autres une poésie. C’est cette identité que nous voulons transmettre : par l’éducation artistique et culturelle dans nos écoles, par des lieux où l’art peut s’exprimer, par les plus grands événements culturels au monde et par la célébration de ceux qui ont façonné l’histoire de notre ville. En 2026, cette démarche a été saluée : Cannes a été élue ville la plus créative de France. J’ai comme rêve et comme ambition collective que la France soit reconnu comme le pays le plus créatif du monde. Il faudra pour cela retrouver l’excellence de l’instruction à concilier avec la liberté de création donc de concrétisation artistique de l’imagination. Vive l’art, vive la culture. Vive la création, vive la transmission. Vive l’esprit français ! #RenéGoscinny #BandeDessinée #Cannes

« Le goût des fonctions publiques et le désir de vivre de l’impôt… c’est le mal secret, qui a rongé tous les anciens pouvoir et qui rongera de même tous les nouveaux » - Alexis de Tocqueville #FonctionPublique #Impôt #Pouvoirs #Thetweetdoesnotmentionanyspecificcountries.Therefore #therearenocountrycodestoreturn.

📚 PABO-leerkrachten gezocht! In augustus opent de eerste @poRenaissance haar deuren. Maar de ambities van de Tocquevillestichting reiken verder: privéscholen door heel Nederland. Kom je ons netwerk van docenten versterken? Mail naar [email protected] voor een gesprek! https://t.co/mdqO1AMkdk #onderwijs #vacature #leraren

El artículo reflexiona sobre la importancia de la religión en la democracia según las ideas de Alexis de Tocqueville, subrayando que esta forma de gobierno no depende únicamente de instituciones, sino de costumbres y valores que fomenten la comunidad, además de abordar la fragilidad de las democracias contemporáneas y su relación con el poder político. #Democracia #Tocqueville #Libertad