Socio-Economic Review Advance Access originally published online on March 17, 2008
Socio-Economic Review 2008 6(3):427-447; doi:10.1093/ser/mwn004
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Theoretical versus practical explanation in political economy and economic sociology: the case of Tocqueville
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Correspondence: rs328{at}cornell.edu
This article represents an attempt to show the relevance of Tocqueville's analyses of economic phenomena to modern political economy and economic sociology. The entry point is his approach to explanation, which is midway between value neutrality (Weber) and the idea that explanations must lead to social change (Marx). Tocqueville instead argues that the analyst (here of economic phenomena) should focus on as well as encourage the actors' sense of freedom. This argument is illustrated with the help of Tocqueville's analysis of the economy in Democracy in America, Recollections and The Old Regime and the Revolution.
Key Words: political economy • economic sociology • Tocqueville • objectivity
JEL classification: B1 history of economic thought through 1925
Although there exists a distinct affinity between political economy and economic sociology in many respects, there are also some differences. One of these differences is that political economy appeared much earlier in history. According to conventional sources, the first mention of the expression ‘political economy’ comes in 1615 with Montchrétien, whereas the first coinage of ‘economic sociology’ would have to wait another 250 years, more precisely until 1879, when it appeared in a volume by W. Stanley Jevons. Although political economy originally represented the mainstream—the conventional way of doing economics—economic sociology has always been a marginal academic topic, and is currently a subfield of sociology.
In this article I shall focus on another difference between economic sociology and political economy, namely their attitudes towards the use of the analysis not only to explain reality but also to change it. Economic sociology in its classical form (in the time of Weber) as well as in its current form (from the 1980s to the present) has not shown very much interest in this issue. For political economists, in contrast, the situation is quite different. Adam Smith, as we know, conceived of The Wealth of Nations as a guide to statesmen, and Marx wanted his work to be of direct and practical use to the workers in their struggle against the bourgeoisie. Although today's generation of political economists have not followed Smith and Marx in being open advocates of some political position, one can sometimes sense a sympathy for the project of closing the gap between theory and practice.
The old type of political economy thought that understanding reality should also make it possible to change it. This meant a very different approach to the task of social science more generally and a correspondingly different task for the social scientist and his or her attitude towards political action in particular. The approach of the old type of political economy has found its sharpest and most famous expression in the 11th thesis of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’ (Tucker, 1978, p. 145).
From what has just been said about explaining versus changing social reality, we may fashion two ideal types, as it were. On the one hand, we have the doctrine of social science objectivity, as explicated among others by Weber; and, on the other hand, we have the 11th thesis on Feuerbach by Marx.1 According to the former ideal type, the social scientist should be careful not to mix politics with what he or she is studying (value neutrality). And according to the latter ideal type, the social scientist always arrives too late to reality—when it has already been shaped by others. The owl of Minerva becomes active only when the day is over, as Hegel has noted.
When you contrast these two ways of approaching social reality in this sharp manner, today's social scientists—political economists as well as economic sociologists—have no difficulty in choosing the ideal type of scholarly objectivity over the ideal type of social science as a tool to change reality, along the lines of the 11th thesis of Feuerbach. They chose, as it were, explanation as a theoretical exercise over explanation as a way of changing reality. The question, however, that I want to raise in this article is as follows: Are these two choices all there is to the problem of how explanation is related to reality? Could there not also be some intermediary form and, if so, what would such an intermediary form look like?
To explore this question I have chosen the example of Tocqueville and his work. Tocqueville never read Marx, and he was active about half a century before the theory of social science objectivity emerged from the work of social scientists in the modern university. Tocqueville, as I shall try to show, struggled throughout his life with the problem of the practical relevance of social science analysis. He approached this problem from different angles in different works, and it is not altogether easy to follow his arguments over the years. Did Tocqueville nonetheless reach a solution to this problem, in the sense that he was able to work out a position that satisfied him and that also differs from the ideal typical positions of Marx and Weber? The answer will have to wait till the end of this article. All that can be said at this stage is that he approached what I call the question of explanation as a theoretical exercise versus explanation as a practical exercise in his very own, original way.
Tocqueville was born in 1805, and he died in 1859. During his lifetime he produced three important works: Democracy in America (1835–1840), Recollections (1850–1851) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). In each of these he tried to develop a type of explanation that was not only theoretical, but at times also practical. How he went about this task will be discussed in the following three sections of the article, each of which is devoted to one of Tocqueville's major works.
Before proceeding to Democracy in America, however, something needs to be said about the fact that Tocqueville is typically not seen as an analyst who has much to say about the economy. This is, to my mind, a mistaken position, and there are good grounds to claim that a close relationship exists between Tocqueville's analysis of economic life and a social theory of the economy. By the latter is meant an analysis of what happens in economic life that primarily draws on social factors as opposed to, say, geographical, biological or narrowly economic factors.
As opposed to Montesquieu, for example, Tocqueville explicitly refuses to explain the wealth of a country by referring to its natural endowment, in the form of climate, soil and the like. Tocqueville argues instead that the major features of a country's economy depend on its moeurs (roughly, norms and related social facts).
Depending on whether a society's social structure is elitist or egalitarian, he continues, work, moneymaking, and the work ethic will be different. So will consumption, risk-taking, and the way that inheritance is structured. While Tocqueville never presented a full social theory of the economy, in the sense of writing some kind of treatise in political economy in which the various parts of the economy are gone through systematically, he did analyse most major sectors of the economy, both in the modern type of (egalitarian) society and in the old (elitist) type of society. Although he was not a direct contributor to the tradition of political economy, his analysis of economic phenomena clearly belongs to this type of approach.
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Part 1. Democracy in America |
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Democracy in America (vol. 1, 1835; vol. 2, 1840) is not generally regarded as a work that has much to contribute when it comes to economic affairs, according to the secondary literature on Tocqueville. George Pierson, author of the magisterial Tocqueville in America, refers for example to Tocqueville's ‘neglect of American material development’ as his ‘great blind spot’ (Pierson, 1996, pp. 762, 764). I disagree with this opinion, which I think is based on a much too narrow understanding of what constitutes the subject area of economics (for Pierson's later retraction of this statement, see Schleifer, 1980, p. xvii). What nonetheless makes for some confusion is that Tocqueville integrates very closely what is today considered economic phenomena with what are also social and political phenomena (see, for example, Swedberg, 2006).
One way of approaching the role that economic factors play in Tocqueville's analysis is to look at the general structure of Democracy in America as well as the conceptual scheme that informs it. The work consists of two volumes which divide up the analysis of North America according to a special logic, even if it is also possible to discern a certain shift in Tocqueville's opinions, which is primarily due to the large amount of time it took him to write the work. Both volumes take their point of departure in what Tocqueville terms ‘the democratic social state’, by which he means the increasingly egalitarian political, social and economic structure of society (Tocqueville, 2004, p. 479). Tocqueville works mainly with three different causal factors: ‘institutions’ (by which he means laws), ‘mores’ (norms and related social facts) and ‘physical causes’ (geography; Tocqueville, 2004, pp. 352–356). In a well-known passage in Democracy in America Tocqueville says that he ascribes more power to mores than to institutions, and more power to institutions than to physical causes (Tocqueville, 2004, p. 356).
Volume 1 deals primarily with the impact of the democratic social state on ‘politics’, and Volume 2 with its impact on ‘civil society’ (Tocqueville, 2004, p. 479). Most of the analysis of the economy can be found in Volume 2, but there are also some significant sections on this topic in Volume 1, mainly related to the American state (e.g. on state finances and foreign trade).
From the conceptual structure of Democracy in America, it is clear that Tocqueville does not see the economy as constituting its own distinct sphere; instead economic phenomena are considered an integral part of society. It is important to note that this does not mean that Tocqueville was unaware of the important changes that economies, especially the English economy, had undergone during the last century. What it does mean is that Tocqueville always saw the economy as developing along with the rest of society, and in this sense the economy did not constitute its own sphere with its own laws. For example, Tocqueville refers to the science of economics a couple of times in Democracy in America, but he is clear that his own conception of what constitutes the economy goes well beyond the division of labour and economies of scale—the two phenomena that he has in mind when he refers to ‘political economy’ (Tocqueville, 2004, pp. 59, 705).
Parenthetically, it can be mentioned that one reason for Tocqueville's insistence that the economy should be analysed as an integral part of society, and not as a separate system or sphere, has to do with his deep personal ambition in life to help France move in a progressive direction. Tocqueville would later become friends with John Stuart Mill, and he was able to follow from close up the invention of homo economicus—but he never agreed with his English friend that economic phenomena should be studied apart from the rest of society.
If we now return to the conceptual structure of Democracy in America, it is clear that society, according to Tocqueville's scheme, goes from ‘the social state’ of ‘aristocracy’ to that of ‘democracy’. The state of aristocracy is modelled on medieval Europe, when a few families in each country had a monopoly on all the resources—economic, political and religious resources. As the centuries progressed, however, this monopoly was broken up, and very little was left of it by the 1800s. Why this whole development has taken place is something that Tocqueville ascribes to God or Providence and which he regards as beyond our understanding.
Tocqueville also argues that this whole process will end in a deeply and thoroughly democratic or egalitarian society, and that the United States has advanced the furthest in this direction. Of great importance is that although the general evolution from aristocracy to democracy is unstoppable, according to Tocqueville, a certain variation in how the process develops is nonetheless possible. Democracy, in particular, can either take the form of ‘democratic despotism’ or a ‘democratic republic’.
The economy is present in an important way in Tocqueville's conceptual scheme. An aristocracy has a monopoly on the main economic resource of the time, namely land, whereas in a democracy a much larger number of people control the land as well as the new types of resources that come with commerce and industry. In the state that Tocqueville terms democratic despotism, people have withdrawn from political activities and are exclusively concerned with their own economic fortunes. Although such a society may flourish economically for a short time, Tocqueville argues, in the long run it is doomed to become stagnant. In a democratic republic, in contrast, people appreciate liberty, take full political responsibility and are active in various political associations that they have created themselves—with a truly dynamic and expanding economy as a result.
Democracy in America contains a unique portrait of the entrepreneurial economy that had begun to emerge in the first half of the 1800s in the United States and which economic historians today regard as the beginning of the remarkable economic growth that the country has been able to sustain ever since (see, for example, North, 1961). Tocqueville's analysis in this respect testifies in an eloquent manner to the fact that he had discovered not only a new political world on the other side of the Atlantic, but also a new economic world (see Swedberg, 2006).
He quickly learned that economic affairs were of great concern to the average person and that Americans truly constituted a ‘commercial people’ (Tocqueville, 2004, p. 365). Everything was in a state of flux; people were always busy; and everybody was interested in making money and cutting deals. Work was honoured and so was profit-making. Everybody wanted to consume, to be comfortable and to satisfy their material desires.
One of Tocqueville's observation concerns the cheap watches that all American males were carrying. These watches were of poor quality, he noted, as opposed to the watches that could be found in various European countries but which few could afford. Tocqueville explained this nascent mass consumption by referring to the fact that the aristocracy had been, and still was, powerful in European countries, whereas democracy (equality) reigned in the United States. High quality and high prices, he said, characterized many items in an aristocracy, and low quality and low prices characterized their equivalents in a democracy.
If one were to characterize Tocqueville's way of analysing economic phenomena, besides them being social, one would have to say that it has to do with his skill of linking economic phenomena to non-economic phenomena. He links, for example, economic phenomena to law in his argument that while inheritance law in an aristocracy allows huge landed property to be maintained (through primogeniture), in a democracy the law of inheritance splits property up by dividing it equally between the (male) children.
He similarly links economic phenomena to religion in his argument about ‘interest properly understood’. Greed and self-interest were widespread in the United States, according to Tocqueville, but their impact had been considerably softened thanks to religion. The message of American religion is that it is in the individual's interest to be honest, reliable and so on; otherwise he or she will not make money. The individual turns in this way into a God-fearing and moral being who looks to other things in life besides just money and profit.
Another feature of Democracy in America that also makes it interesting to follow Tocqueville's analysis of various economic phenomena is his use of language. Since what Tocqueville saw was new, he often had to invent new terms or use old words in new ways. He also drew on a vocabulary for talking about the economy that was very different from the one that is current today, and which often seems richer, with the capacity to throw new light on things.
Tocqueville was, for example, well aware that ‘interest’ and ‘greed’ drive economic action, but he also felt that emotions played an important role in the way that the Americans went about their economic affairs. He refers, for example, to their ‘love of well-being’ and how ‘the desire to acquire goods is the dominant passion’ (‘l'amour du bien-être’, ‘le désir d'acquérir les biens de ce monde [est] la passion dominante’; Tocqueville, 2004, pp. 623, 638).
He also felt that the Americans liked to see life, including the economy, as a lottery and that they immensely enjoyed the idea of being the one who might win. There was a boldness to the entrepreneurial undertakings of the Americans that Tocqueville had never seen in France, and at one point in Democracy in America he speaks of their ‘heroism of trading’ (‘une sorte d'héroïsme dans leur manières de fair le commerce’; Tocqueville, 2004, pp. 464–466). And there was, finally, also the possibility of the emergence of a totally new elite in the United States—the ‘manufacturing aristocracy’ (‘l'aristocratie manufacturière’; Tocqueville, 2004, p. 652).
Though he did not use these terms to describe his experiences, what Tocqueville found in America was a consumer society, and a society with an open class structure as well as quite a bit of social mobility. It was a society where the famous transition from status to contract was practically complete (except for in the South, which Tocqueville described as a form of aristocracy). The United States was (again, to use terms that he himself did not use) a capitalist society and way ahead of France in terms of economic modernity.
At this point the reader will hopefully agree that one can find an original and interesting analysis of economic phenomena in Democracy in America, and that one is therefore justified in bringing up Tocqueville in a discussion of political economy and economic sociology. Let me now return to the distinction between theoretical and practical explanation. There are at least two instances in Democracy in America where Tocqueville not only seeks to explain what is going on (theoretically oriented explanation), but also engages in a type of analysis where the point is to locate those parts of reality that can be affected by human effort (practically oriented explanation).
The first of these is to be found in Tocqueville's discussion of the democratic republic versus democratic despotism. Unless countermeasures are taken in modern democratic society—as the Americans had done, with the help of their townships and their special brand of religion—the population will become depoliticized and give in to consumerism and materialism. People cannot totally change the society in which they live or its general evolution, but there is nonetheless room for some change in direction. This is true not only for society but also for the individual. In Tocqueville's famous formulation:
Providence did not create mankind entirely independent or altogether enslaved. Around each man is traced, to be sure, a fatal circle beyond which he may not venture, but within the ample limits thus defined man is powerful and free, and so are peoples. (Tocqueville, 2004, p. 834)
The second instance in which Tocqueville moves in the direction of practical explanation can be found in his discussion of the role of the factors that are responsible for the evolution of the United States. He singles out three causes that are often mentioned by various commentators in this context—history (‘previous events’), geography (‘soil’) and biology (‘race’)—and sharply rejects the argument that these would somehow have totally determined the fate of the United States not only as ‘false’ but also as ‘cowardly’ (Tocqueville, 2004, p. 834).2
To argue that these doctrines are ‘false’ means that Tocqueville considered deterministic doctrines to be wrong on intellectual grounds; deterministic doctrines fail to adequately explain what happens. But to say that they are also ‘cowardly’ means that Tocqueville felt that this type of doctrine should, in addition, be challenged on the grounds that its advocates do not even dare to entertain the notion that people should be allowed to decide things on their own. Again, it would seem, Tocqueville was trying to decide not only which factors determine the evolution of a society but also which factors could possibly be influenced by individual actors.
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Part 2: Recollections |
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Tocqueville's political memoir, Recollections, is primarily known for its important analysis of the 1848 Revolution. In the context of this particular article, however, there is another quality of Recollections that is of special interest, namely what it has to say about Tocqueville as a politician. Recollections covers the years 1848–1849, a period during which Tocqueville was first a member of the Chamber of Deputies, then an observer of the Revolution and finally Minister of Foreign Affairs. This work also contains important reflections on Tocqueville's more general experience as a politician, more specifically as a deputy, during 9 years of his life, 1839–1848.
That Tocqueville worked as a politician, as opposed to as a writer or academic, reminds us of the fact that his main ambition was to affect the course of France, and that he thought that politics was the most efficient way of accomplishing this. He could, for example, have chosen to become an academic and devote his life to social science, or he could have followed this course and tried to unite it with a political career (as Guizot did). But this was not his choice. Once he had gained fame with the first volume of Democracy in America (1835), and even before its second volume was finished (1840), he tried to enter politics, which meant that he had to give up all forms of serious writing.
In deciding upon politics as a vocation and not on science, Tocqueville made a conscious choice about the way that he wanted to affect reality. And while a social scientist may refrain from making open choices about values, in the name of objectivity and value neutrality, this of course is not possible for a politician. Tocqueville also decided on parliamentary politics, as opposed to Marx who chose to engage in revolutionary politics during the very same period (see, for example, Aron, 1968 for a comparison of Marx and Tocqueville on the 1848 Revolution).
From the perspective of this article it is possible to look at Tocqueville's activities as a politician from a different angle than the customary one, namely in terms of what factors he thought could be affected by human effort and which could not. It is clear, for example, that Tocqueville thought that the time had come to end slavery in the French colonies, and he drew up a strategy for how this could be accomplished. He also felt that it was imperative to safeguard the Republic; and his work on the Constitutional Commission in 1848 shows, for example, how he thought this could be achieved.
Both of these examples illustrate how circumstances at times provided Tocqueville with an opportunity to change reality, according to his ideas, and how he eagerly seized on such opportunities. Tocqueville had detested slavery from the time he was a young man, and when the English, to general surprise, set free all of the slaves in their colonies in 1834, he realized that France could be compelled to do the same (see, for example, Mancini, 1989). He worked very hard in the Chamber of Deputies to accomplish this goal, even if the abolition of slavery in the French colonies would first take place during the 1848 Revolution and without his involvement.
Similarly, the Revolution of 1848 opened up a window of opportunity for Tocqueville in his capacity as a member of a committee that had been asked to draw up a constitution for the Second Republic. Tocqueville suggested various changes that were essentially aimed at stabilizing political life in the new republic, especially through the mechanism of balancing one type of power against another. The measures involved his suggestion that there be two chambers (rejected), that the President could not be re-elected (accepted), and that judges could not be politically removed (accepted; see Gargan, 1955, pp. 101–115).
Finally, it should also be mentioned that during his years as a deputy, Tocqueville outlined the means by which the French people could be reawakened to glory, through a successful colonial policy in Algeria. This could best be done, he stated, by expropriating agricultural land for French settlers, by destroying all resistance through violence directed at the civilian population and by adopting more equally destructive measures along these lines (Tocqueville, 2001). In the case of Algeria, in brief, Tocqueville used everything he knew about social structures and institutions not to advance the cause of liberty, but to help the French state crush the resistance in its colonies.
It is clear from what has just been said that it is not possible to draw a sharp line between Tocqueville the politician and Tocqueville the writer, since he drew heavily on his theoretical analysis in his political life. In this, of course, he was similar to Marx and other social theoreticians who have tried their hand at practical affairs. But there is more to the story than this, and, as we also know from the case of Marx and other intellectuals who have attempted to become politicians, it is not easy to switch from vita contemplativa to vita activa.
In Recollections, Tocqueville says that his great success with Democracy in America had made him think that he would also be very successful in politics—but that he eventually came to realize that he was wrong in this belief. This work also contains several other passages in which Tocqueville bitterly states how unhappy his 9 years as a politician had been and how oppressive it had been to work in the Chamber of Deputies.
I shall now leave the discussion of Tocqueville as a professional politician, since the main focus of this article is on his theoretical analysis and not on his political career and the choices that he made in this capacity. I shall therefore return to Recollections as a theoretical document in the sense that when Tocqueville acted as an author he had to portray practical events (including the ones that he had participated in himself) by using some theoretical–analytical scheme, to make sense of them and explain them. It should therefore also be possible in Recollections, in short, to distinguish between a theoretical and a practical type of explanation.
Tocqueville was well aware of the fact that in writing down his experiences in 1848–1849, he had to make a choice in selecting what had operated as causal factors and what had not. He states explicitly, for example, that he did not want to just retell events one after the other—a practice that he always associated with bad historians. Recollections also starts out with an interesting discussion in which Tocqueville states that he is only writing for himself and that the result will never be published.3 He gives several reasons for proceeding in this way, including the fact that he is not interested in polishing and repolishing the text to make it presentable to the general public. Another of Tocqueville's motives for wanting to keep the text secret is of more relevance for the purposes of this article, namely that this would make it easier for him to establish the truth. More precisely, it would allow him to explore his own motives as well as the motives of others in a more honest fashion since he could disregard the reactions of others to what he wrote.
In the introduction to one of the standard editions of Recollections, Fernand Braudel complains that Tocqueville ignores economic matters; this complaint is also registered by George Pierson in Tocqueville in America. According to Braudel, Tocqueville was, for example, ‘rather inattentive to underlying economic realities’, something that he attributes to the fact that Tocqueville was relatively well off himself (Braudel, 1989, p. 68). And, again, this remark about Tocqueville's alleged disregard for the economy is perplexing since Recollections is full of remarks about economic life. Tocqueville was especially concerned with the emphasis on economic success in the July Monarchy—the famous enrichissez-vous!—and how the issues of employment and private property became central issues in the 1848 Revolution.
Tocqueville's main emphasis in his discussion of the July Monarchy was on the destructive nature of encouraging people to first and foremost devote themselves to making money and care for their economic affairs. The July Monarchy was run for the middle class and by a king who through his ‘greed and softness’ had come to personify this class in the most shameful fashion, King Louis-Philippe (Tocqueville, 1970, p. 6). Personal virtues and the grandeur of France meant nothing during this depressing period in the history of France, according to Tocqueville. Politicians advocated a crude form of materialism, and they treated the state like ‘a trading company’ (Tocqueville, 1970, p. 5). People like Thiers and Guizot operated by promising jobs to whoever supported them, and securing a job in the state constituted the major ambition of the members of the middle class.
The result of this type of politics, according to Tocqueville, was that the citizens lost all interest in politics and the state grew more powerful. The middle class wanted to sell its political soul and eagerly snapped up everything that the political leaders offered. The rest of the people were excluded from politics: the workers on the one hand, and the rural population on the other. With a spineless middle class, an embittered working class and an ignored rural population, the scene was set for the 1848 Revolution.
After the Revolution of 1789 many peasants had been able to secure a small piece of land, Tocqueville noted, to which they were deeply attached. Another key development after the Revolution was the growth of the working class population, especially in the Paris region. The workers had also been led to believe by socialist propaganda that private property was the cause of their misery and that if private property were abolished, they would be far better off.
As an example of the workers' beliefs along these lines, Tocqueville tells the following anecdote. One day during the 1848 Revolution, Adolphe Blanqui (the brother of Auguste Blanqui) overheard his two servants discuss the revolution and why they supported it so strongly. The reason was that in a few days it was they, not their employer, who were going to eat the good food and have the good clothes (Tocqueville, 1970, pp. 142–143). To Tocqueville, this type of thinking represented a dangerous illusion; individual property, as he saw it, was central to a free society and could not be abolished without disastrous consequences. It was one of the ‘laws that hold society together’ (Tocqueville, 1970, p. 85).
Tocqueville's search for factors that can be affected by conscious human effort (central to practical explanations), as opposed to factors that cannot (central to theoretical explanation), is evident at several points in Recollections. At the very outset of this work, for example, Tocqueville states that his goal is to ‘understand and judge’—not just to understand (Tocqueville, 1970, p. 4). To judge means to Tocqueville, among other things, to sort out the deep fundamental causes that cannot be affected by conscious human effort from the ones that can. Recollections contains, for example, a discussion of what ‘general causes’ and what ‘secondary causes’ had brought about the Revolution, and these two categories overlap to a certain degree with causes that can, and causes that cannot, be affected by human effort (Tocqueville, 1970, pp. 61–63).
By general causes Tocqueville means causes that were deeply imbedded in French society at the time, such as the presence in Paris of a large working class population and the general ‘passion for material pleasures’ that existed in French society at the time (Tocqueville, 1970, pp. 62–63). Secondary causes were close to ‘accidents’, and they helped to bring the primary causes to fruition by ‘fertilizing’ them (Tocqueville, 1970, p. 62). As examples of the latter Tocqueville mentions a series of factors, such as the clumsy way that the opposition behaved and various actions by members of the government (Tocqueville, 1970, p. 63).
Tocqueville summarizes his views of the role of human intentionality, accidental causes and primary causes in a memorable passage that uses the kite as the unifying metaphor:
One has to have spent long years in the whirlwind of party politics to realize how far men drive each other from their intended courses, and how the world's fate is moved by their efforts, but often in opposite directions from the wishes of those who produced the current, like a kite flies by the opposing action of the wind and the string. (Tocqueville, 1970, p. 28)
Tocqueville's analysis of socialism is also relevant in this context, not least because of what it tells us about theoretical versus practical explanation. According to Tocqueville, what made the role of the socialists so disastrous in the 1848 Revolution was that they ascribed too much freedom to human volition and, in doing so, misled the workers into openly challenging the existing regime. According to Tocqueville, socialism was part of a set of increasingly popular beliefs at the time that were propagated in the form of ‘economic and political theories which...tended to encourage the belief that human wretchedness was due to laws and not to providence and that poverty could be abolished by changing the system of society’ (Tocqueville, 1970, p. 63). Related to this observation, Tocqueville states:
I hate all those absolute systems that make all the events of history depend on great first causes linked together by the chain of fate and thus succeed, so to speak, in banishing men from the history of the human race. Their boasted breadth seems to me too narrow, and their mathematical exactness false. (Tocqueville, 1970, p. 62)
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Part III: The Old Regime and the French Revolution |
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When the Second Republic was ended by Louis–Napoleon through a coup d'état in 1851, Tocqueville immediately withdrew from politics in protest. His enforced idleness gave him plenty of time to reflect on the differences between being an analyst and author, on the one hand, and a political actor, on the other. This was also the theme that he chose for his presidential address in April 1852 at the Academy of the Political and Moral Sciences (Tocqueville, 1989).
Tocqueville started out by discussing the differences between analysing politics, on the one hand, and being active politically, on the other, between la science politique and l'art du gouvernement. First of all, these two modes of behaving must never be confounded, he said, and the reason for this is, while the science of politics deals with ‘laws’ (drawn from ‘the general and permanent condition of mankind’), the art of government must be centred on what happens at the moment, with all its details and non-permanent features (Tocqueville, 1989, p. 230). The second difference between la science politique and l'art du gouvernement is that ‘to excel in one does not mean that you will succeed in the other’. Or even worse: to be a writer actually makes it harder to be a good politician. There are many reasons for this, according to Tocqueville, including the fact that authors tend to think that political events follow ‘the logic of ideas’, whereas in reality people follow their ‘passions’; authors primarily seek ‘originality’, although this is of no interest to people in general (ibid.).
Tocqueville was not of the opinion, however, that the science of politics was without use or that the political analyst should stand outside of society and produce analyses with no other purpose than to please other political scientists. There is a great power to the ideas of political science, Tocqueville says, even if these ideas work ‘slowly and in secret’ (Tocqueville, 1989, p. 233). They often influence politicians and people, even when those influenced are not aware of it.
While Tocqueville withdrew from politics after 1851 for political reasons, it is clear that the coup d'état by Napoleon III also provided him with an opportunity to devote himself to a task that he had wanted to carry out for a long time. He had by now also come to think that he would not be remembered so much as a politician, but rather as an author. ‘Whatever I will leave behind, will rather be due to what I have written than to what I have done’, as he phrased it in a letter to a friend (Tocqueville, 1977, p. 230).
The specific task that Tocqueville had in mind was to produce a work that continued his study of what it was that made ‘modern societies’ develop in either the direction of liberty or in that of democratic despotism (Tocqueville, 1998, p. 6; cf. p. 86). This time, however, Tocqueville wanted to study France, and not the United States, which meant that he had to come to terms with the French Revolution. And as always, there was an attempt from Tocqueville's side to produce a type of analysis that could be of some practical and not simply of theoretical use. He wanted, as he put it in the preface to The Old Regime, not only to discover what had killed the patient but also how the patient could have been cured.
Two general theses famously inform Tocqueville's study. The first is that the French Revolution represented a new type of political revolution, one that appealed to people in their capacity as human beings regardless of their nationality. The French Revolution was, according to Tocqueville, in this sense similar to religious revolutions. The second was that the French Revolution had not by itself created the highly centralized state structure that appeared in the early 1800s; it had only continued and accelerated a process that had started long before the Revolution.
Neither of the two main theses of The Old Regime is particularly economic in nature, and it has also been claimed that Tocqueville disregards the economic dimension of the French Revolution in his work. François Furet, who regards The Old Regime as the most important work ever written on the French Revolution, says for example that its ‘economic analysis is always superficial and vague’ (Furet, 1981, p. 151). This, however, is a misleading statement, at least to the extent that economic factors do play an important role in Tocqueville's attempt to explain why the Revolution took place. To show this, I will say something briefly about the role that Tocqueville assigns to the increasing separation of classes before the Revolution. Closely related to this process, according to his argument, is also the process of centralization and how it affected the economy.
Tocqueville's most celebrated economic insight in The Old Regime deals, however, with a different phenomenon, namely that the French economy grew very quickly during the 20 or so years before the Revolution. This was a fact that had been forgotten after the Revolution, in the general effort to portray the Revolution as a justified reaction to oppression. As Tocqueville was able to show, however, important economic reforms had been carried out in the second half of the 18th century, and they had paid off. They had also accelerated the Revolution and, as Tocqueville pointed out, the Revolution had been supported the most strongly precisely in the parts of France where the reforms had been the most successful. Tocqueville explained this paradox in the following way. When people are used to oppression, they expect very little and are slow to mobilize. But when they sense that things can become better, as evidenced by what is going on around them, they are quick to mobilize (Tocqueville, 1998, pp. 217–224).
But the main cause of the Revolution was something else, according to Tocqueville namely, the disastrous separation of the classes in French society. Not only were the three main classes—the aristocracy, the peasants and the middle class—sharply separated from one another, they were also separated within themselves. The result was a type of individualism that Tocqueville called ‘collective individualism’, which had the same effect in aristocratic society as ‘individualism’ in democratic society, namely that it made people turn away from cooperating in public enterprises and turn towards their own private and economic affairs (Tocqueville, 1998, p. 163).
One important tool that the French state had used in creating this collective individualism was taxation, and The Old Regime contains a very thorough and sophisticated analysis in what Schumpeter would later call ‘fiscal sociology’. Tocqueville can be described as more or less obsessed with the role that taxation played in shaping French society, its social as well as its political and economic structure. Again and again in The Old Regime (as well as in its unfinished sequel) Tocqueville turns to the role of taxation.
He emphasizes, for example, that the aristocracy was exempt from certain onerous taxes, something that set it apart from the other social classes and made it a target for their hatred. The taxation system also encouraged the aristocracy as well as the middle class to move into the cities and leave the peasants behind. While the aristocracy and the middle class enjoyed light taxation in the cities, the peasants had to carry the main burden of the country's expenses. Several old and humiliating forms of taxation were also still in existence before the Revolution, such as the obligation to provide free labour to the state as well as to the aristocracy (corvée). This also contributed to the creation of a deep hatred of the aristocracy and the ruling elite among the peasants.
The French state encouraged the separation of the classes, according to Tocqueville, since this made it easier to govern the country. Centralization was also the unintended consequence of various other policies, especially the attempt to raise money through the sale of offices. This took place on a gigantic scale and eventually caused such bureaucratic chaos that a parallel, second system of administration had to be introduced. This second system was extremely centralized in nature and placed nearly all the power in the hands of a new office—that of the intendant. All in all, there were some 30 intendants in France, each answering only to the Royal Council.
That all political and economic power was transferred to the hands of the intendant contributed to the general process of making the average person very passive, according to Tocqueville. Whenever something needed to be done, people did not act themselves, but turned instead to the intendant. ‘No one thought any important business could be well managed without the involvement of the state’, Tocqueville notes (Tocqueville, 1998, p. 143). ‘The farmers themselves, people ordinarily very impatient of instruction, were brought to believe that if agriculture was not progressing, it was chiefly the government's fault, because it gave them neither advice nor enough help’ (ibid.). It was the same with the wealthy landowners and the manufacturers, who also typically turned to the government instead of doing something themselves (Tocqueville, 1998, p. 144).
Finally, The Old Regime contains an interesting analysis of ‘the economists’ or the physiocrats, as they were known in the 1700s. Posterity has concentrated on the economic theories of the physiocrates, usually noting that they saw agriculture as the only source of wealth and that Quesnay developed the idea of the economy as a distinct system of its own. Tocqueville, however, thought that the physiocrates were important mainly for their political ideas, not for what they had to say about the economy. He especially noted that they believed in a form of enlightened despotism and were partisans of a new and very powerful type of state. The new France should be run by the state, according to the physiocrates, and in a scientific manner. From Tocqueville's perspective, the physiocrates saw France as a ‘political model farm’ (Tocqueville, 1998, p. 294).
Just as in Tocqueville's two other books, the analysis in The Old Regime bears witness to its author's attempt to create a type of explanation that not only clarifies what has happened, but also tries to locate and better understand those factors that can be affected by human effort. I have already cited Tocqueville's remark in the preface about not only knowing what killed the patient but also how he or she could have been cured. The full quote reads as follows:
I admit that in studying our society in all its aspects, I have never entirely lost sight of our modern society. I wanted to discover not only the illness that killed the patient, but how the patient could have been cured. (Tocqueville, 1998, p. 86)
Tocqueville refers in this metaphor to himself as a doctor, and the notion of social science as a form of medicine also works today since medicine in modern society is a type of enterprise that in some ways is more practical than scientific. A doctor typically diagnoses what is wrong and tries to prescribe what will work, regardless of the reasons why something works.
Tocqueville's concern with what works in reality, and how, within certain limits, you can create a better society, comes out with extra clarity in the discussion of Languedoc in The Old Regime. According to Tocqueville, most of the ills that had beset pre-revolutionary France had been avoided in Languedoc, thanks to the wise policy of the local elite. There were especially three reasons why Languedoc showed the other parts of France ‘what they could have become’ (Tocqueville, 1998, p. 249, emphasis added; c.f. p. 256). First, local political freedom had been preserved to a much larger extent in Languedoc than elsewhere (Tocqueville, 1998, p. 251). Second, its system of taxation was much more equitable and well administered. And third, Languedoc had a well working and non-oppressive system of public works. The result was a society in which the different social classes were not separated from one another but worked together.
That Tocqueville's ideas about Languedoc were not simply his own political fantasies but seen as having a certain realism and even some relevance for practical politics can be illustrated by the impact they had in Tsarist Russia. In the spring of 1857 Prince Vladimir Sherkasky suggested in an article that Tocqueville's ideas on self-government in Languedoc should be put in practice in Russia (Mélonio, 1998, p. 110). On a more general level, there is also the statement of Guizot that The Old Regime differed very much from Democracy in America in that the latter work had essentially been the product of ‘a free spectator’, while The Old Regime had been written by someone who knew ‘the demands of power’ and had felt ‘the weight of responsibility’ (Mélonio, 1998, p. 119).
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Many political commentators have denied the fact's existence because they could not explain it, judging, like Molière's doctor [in The Hypochondriac] that a sick man could not be cured against the rules. Tocqueville, The Old Regime, p. 221
To conclude this discussion about what I have called theoretical versus practical explanation, it may be helpful to summarize what we know so far about Tocqueville's position. There is, first of all, his statement in Democracy in America about certain ‘cowardly’ doctrines. According to Tocqueville, to repeat, there exist several ways of explaining how social reality has become what it is that should be avoided because they are deterministic in nature: geography, race theory and a certain type of historical analysis. Here also belongs what Tocqueville says in Recollections about ‘absolute systems that make all the events of history depend on great first causes linked together by the chain of fate’.
An analysis that assumes that the hands of the actors are bound, and that the actors have no freedom whatsoever to direct their own actions, is consequently false and should be avoided, according to Tocqueville. The same goes for an analysis such as socialism, we learn from Recollections, since it tells the workers that they are free to totally remake society. Where this type of doctrine goes wrong, in short, is by erring in the opposite direction from the theories of geographical, racial and historical determinism. In short, people are free, according to Tocqueville, but only to some degree; there exists a point somewhere along a scale from total determinism to total freedom that is essential for the social scientist to locate.
Where exactly is this point to be found and what does it entail? Tocqueville gives a precise answer to this question, namely in his theory of society and how it evolves from aristocracy to democracy. There exists, he says, a ‘fatal circle’ within which people are free, and beyond which they cannot move, according to the closing lines in Democracy in America. In reading this work we also soon get to know the range within which people in a democracy are free to move, namely from democratic despotism in a state-centred society to liberty in a democratic republic.
A close reading of the same work also indicates the range within which people can affect things in an aristocracy, and this is from a society with royal despotism to an aristocratic republic. What these two states look like is spelled out in considerable detail in The Old Regime. The latter work, it should be noted, is informed by exactly the same conceptual scheme as Democracy in America: history moves from aristocracy to democracy, and during both of these periods it is essential to make the right political choices since the consequences of not doing so is that freedom will be lost (see Fig. 1).
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This last formulation about freedom draws attention to the well-known fact that freedom represents the central value for Tocqueville. Commentators on his works often cite his statement that freedom represents the highest value of them all, and also that he advocates a kind of freedom that goes together with a stable legal system, a sense of religion and order more generally. To this we may add that for Tocqueville's preferred type of freedom to come into existence, the actors have to have developed a certain sense for those parts of society which can be influenced by human volition and those which cannot. This is where the political and social scientist comes into the picture; he or she can help the actors to better understand how to introduce freedom.
While it is clear that freedom represents the supreme value for Tocqueville, it is also clear that it does not interfere very much with his analysis, in the sense that it is never introduced abruptly into his analysis. Freedom rather resides in the background of the analysis; it is also present to some degree in some of his concepts, such as the idea of a democratic republic and (negatively) in the idea of democratic despotism.
The point I am trying to lead up to, and which will allow us to better establish how and to what extent Tocqueville's way of proceeding represents a novelty, is that Tocqueville did succeed in carving out a position for social science that is activistic in nature and takes on a social science perspective at the same time. According to the ideal typical account of the Weberian doctrine of objectivity or value neutrality, which is predominant in today's economic sociology, social science should not tell the social scientist what he or she should do; it should analyse reality period. Tocqueville does not explicitly tell the reader what he or she should do either, but as part of the analysis—and this is where the difference to Weber's position resides—he argues that one should decide to what extent certain factors can indeed be affected by human volition.
Tocqueville implicitly rejects the ideal type of Thesis Eleven that political economy has to enter social reality at a very early stage so that it can help to create change since the traditional type of explanation always comes after something has been done, which relegates it to a passive role. Tocqueville makes a weaker claim, which is nonetheless more in the spirit of political economy than in that of economic sociology and its adherence to the doctrine of objectivity. This claim can, with some slight exaggeration, be formulated as follows: while social science is about post factum explanation and not about change, one of its important tasks should nonetheless be to explore which parts of social reality can be changed and which cannot—and thereby be in a position to indicate to the actors where there may be some room to institute freedom and where this is not the case.
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For help with this article I thank Mabel Berezin, Françoise Mélonio, Claus Offe, Wolfgang Streeck and anonymous reviewers at SER.
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1 It should be emphasized that both Weber's and Marx's positions on objectivity and value neutrality are far more complex than the ideal types that have been sketched here.
2 One can also find references to ‘cowardly doctrines’ and ‘opinions’ in two notes that Tocqueville used in preparation for Democracy in America (Schleifer, 1980, p. 68). He also attacks racial theories in his correspondence with Gobineau on the ground that they are ‘fatalistic’. Tocqueville says here that what he is concerned with is not so much the question of whether racial theories are true or not, but rather with their ‘practical consequences’. He writes to Gobineau that ‘inherent in your doctrine are all the evils produced by permanent inequality: pride, violence, the scorn of one's fellow men, tyranny and abjection in every one of their forms’ (Tocqueville, 1959, pp. 227–229; c.f. Schleifer, 1980, pp. 69–70).
3 Recollections was published in 1893 by Tocqueville's grandnephew, in accordance with Tocqueville's testamentary instructions. For Tocqueville's testamentary instructions, see Jean-Louis Benoît (2004), Tocqueville: un destin paradoxal, p. 350.
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