Alexis de Tocqueville · Politics
Tocqueville’s last great work turned from America to the French Revolution, and to the deepest tension in his thought: that a people may passionately love <em>equality</em> while caring little for <em>liberty</em> - and that the Revolution, far from destroying the centralised state, completed it.
Twenty years after Democracy in America, near the end of his life, Tocqueville turned from the new world to the great event that had haunted his family and his nation: the French Revolution. In The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856), he brought to the study of the Revolution the same penetrating method he had brought to America - looking beneath the surface of dramatic events for the deep social causes, the long, slow movements of which the Revolution was only the violent culmination. The result was a work that overturned the conventional understanding of the Revolution and remains one of the most original books ever written about it.
The conventional view, held by friends and enemies of the Revolution alike, was that 1789 marked a total break - a sudden, radical rupture that swept away the old order entirely and began the world anew. Revolutionaries celebrated this rupture; reactionaries lamented it; but both agreed it was a rupture. Tocqueville’s great and disturbing thesis was that this was largely an illusion. The Revolution, he argued, was far more a continuation than a break - that beneath the violent surface, the new France inherited far more from the old monarchy than anyone wished to admit, and that the deepest tendencies the Revolution is credited with creating had in fact been at work, under the monarchy, for generations before 1789. To understand the Revolution, Tocqueville insisted, you must understand the old regime that produced it - for the Revolution did not spring from nothing, nor create a wholly new world, but carried to completion processes long under way.
The most powerful and counterintuitive of Tocqueville’s arguments concerns centralisation - the very thing he had warned against as the great enemy of liberty. The Revolution, in the popular imagination, had swept away the old order and built a new, modern, centralised state in its place. Tocqueville showed that this got the story almost exactly backwards. The centralised administrative state was not the creation of the Revolution; it was the creation of the monarchy, built up steadily over the centuries before 1789 as the French kings, in their long struggle to subdue the independent nobility and the provincial liberties, drew more and more power and function into the central government and its corps of royal administrators.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned Tocqueville’s analysis of the French Revolution in The Old Regime and the Revolution . Explain in your own words two of his great paradoxes: that the Revolution continued the monarchy’s centralisation, and that a people can love equality more than liberty.
Leads to Karl Marx.
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