We can profitably use Elster’s Tocqueville for making sense of our own social state.’ He brilliantly explains Tocqueville’s seemingly contradictory formulations and ambiguities of language as iterations in search of causal linkages. Dubbing Tocqueville the ‘first’ social scientist, Elster focuses on how he thought rather than on what he found. ‘In this remarkable book, Jon Elster makes Tocqueville’s conceptual system a critical part of a large intellectual project. In the process, the book's provocative title becomes ever more plausible.’Ĭlaus Offe - Hertie School of Governance, Berlin They can enrich the toolbox of today's social scientists. Elster's method of ‘extracting’, ‘reconstructing’, and ‘decoding’ through sophisticated interrogation the French democratic aristocrat's writings brings to light a number of ‘exportable’ causal mechanisms. The author finds, apart from limited instances of ‘elusive’, ‘muddled’, and ‘extravagant’ rhetoric, an amazing number of original and fine-grained causal mechanisms that Tocqueville pioneered to employ in his effort to explain social phenomena and change.
In this book, he mines the plentiful repository of de Tocqueville's Democracy in America and Ancien Regime. ‘Apart for his own contributions to social theorizing, Elster is famous for his skills of ‘making sense’ of the work of classical writers in social thought. No serious readers of Tocqueville will return to his writings without Elster’s question in the back of their minds.’ With characteristic care and incisiveness, Elster explores insights embedded in Tocqueville’s great works, Democracy in America and The Ancien Régime and the Revolution, with a view to the question: does social science begin here? This book lays the groundwork for what ought to be an ongoing conversation among social scientists intent on exploring the origins of their field. ‘The long battle over the thought of one of the nineteenth century’s most enigmatic figures continues here with the publication of Jon Elster’s Alexis de Tocqueville, the First Social Scientist. Stephen Holmes - New York University School of Law A sumptuous, stringent and path-breaking book.’ ‘Elster’s jeweler's eye has seen into the hidden intricacies and profundities of Tocqueville the political psychologist and comparative social historian.
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