Reading Tocqueville: Diachrony, Synchrony and New Perspectives

The publication of Tocqueville’s Oeuvres complètes begun by Gallimard in 1951 — twenty-nine volumes of which are already in circulation — will soon be completed with the upcoming publication of tome XVII’s three volumes. Hereafter, these works will be referred to in this paper with the abbreviation OC, followed by the tome (in Roman numerals), and when necessary the volume (in Arabic numerals). (Translator’s note: all quotations from De la démocratie en Amérique are from Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Arthur Goldhammer [New York: Library of America, 2004], hereafter referred to as DA in the footnotes.)Google Scholar

Raymond Aron, Les étapes de la pensée sociologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1967). In this same book, Aron also devotes 30 pages or so to ‘Comte, Tocqueville et Marx et la révolution de 48’.Google Scholar

See Raymond Aron’s article, ‘De l’existence historique’, published in Cahiers de philosophie politique et juridique de l’Université de Caen, 15 (1989) pp. 147–62.Google Scholar

In ‘Tocqueville retrouvé’, The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville, 26(1) (2005), p. 32. On this subject, see: J.L. Benoît and E. Keslassy Alexis de Tocqueville, textes économiques, anthologie critique (Paris: Pocket-Agora, 2005).Google Scholar

Raymond Aron, Paix et guerre entre les nations (Paris: Calmann-Lévy 1962).Google Scholar

Marcel Gauchet, ‘Tocqueville, l’Amérique et nous’, Libre, 7 (1980), pp. 83–4.Google Scholar

‘Cette pensée qui ne me paraît pas bien digne de la grande âme de Pascal résume parfaitement l’état des âmes dans [ce] pays’, writes Tocqueville, not having taken into account the strategic aspect of Pascal’s wager, which first tries to unsettle the libertine through a relatively simple calculation of probabilities (De la démocratie en Amérique, ed. Eduardo Nolla [Paris: J. Vrin, 1990], 2 vols, I, p. 117, n. d).Google Scholar

L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, L. I, Ch. 3 (OC, II, 1, p. 86). (Translator’s note: all quotations are from Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, trans. Alan S. Kahan, ed. François Furet and Françoise Mélonio [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998], p. 101, hereafter referred to as ORR in the footnotes.).Google Scholar

In Charles Taylor, ‘Modes of Civil Society’, Public Culture, 3 (1990), p. 111. Here, Taylor is taking up an expression already used by Tocqueville.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 4.Google Scholar

This trend can be tied to thinkers like Putnam, Edwards and Foley, as well as many others. It is further worth reading: Bob Edward and Michael W. Foley, ‘Civil Society and Social Capital: A Primer’, in Beyond Tocqueville: Civil Society and the Social Capital Debate in Comparative Perspective, ed. Bob Edward, Michael W. Foley and Mario Dani (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001);Google Scholar

and Johann N. Neem, ‘Squaring the Circle’, The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville, 27(1) (2006), pp. 99–121.Google Scholar

Françoise Mélonio, Tocqueville et les Français (Paris: Aubier, 1993), p. 11.Google Scholar