The book proposes a new interpretation of Alexis de Tocqueville that views him first and foremost as a social scientist rather than as a political theorist. Drawing on his earlier work on the explanation of social behavior, Elster argues that Tocqueville's main claim to our attention today rests on the large number of exportable causal mechanisms to be found in his work, many o...
The book proposes a new interpretation of Alexis de Tocqueville that views him first and foremost as a social scientist rather than as a political theorist. Drawing on his earlier work on the explanation of social behavior, Elster argues that Tocqueville's main claim to our attention today rests on the large number of exportable causal mechanisms to be found in his work, many of which are still worthy of further exploration. Elster proposes a novel reading of Democracy in America in which the key explanatory variable is the rapid economic and political turnover rather than equality of wealth at any given point in time. He also offers a reading of The Ancien Régime and the Revolution as grounded in the psychological relations among the peasantry, the bourgeoisie, and the nobility. Consistently going beyond exegetical commentary, he argues that Tocqueville is eminently worth reading today for his substantive and methodological insights.
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Most social scientist, if they have read Tocqueville, probably do not think he is up to their standards. They may applaud his ambition, but deny that it was matched by actual achievements. I do not have any hard evidence to prove this statement, but a long acquaintance with the social sciences tells me that he is much less of a household name than Marx, Durkheim, or Weber. In the index to James Colman's Foundations of Social Theory, these receive respectively eight, nine and sixteen references, Tocqueville only one. The reason, I suspect, is that for contemporary social science what counts as "an achievement" is determined by a certain view of science as resting on lawlike theories and aiming at sharp predictions.
I have argued against this view in various places, most recently in Expla... (查看原文)
0 有用 ㄍㄨㄥˋㄑㄩ 2012-11-11 03:05:24
初中生科普读物
0 有用 为自己留白 2017-10-28 16:18:59
其实在传统的托克维尔研究中来说，Elster算是异类了，作者称托克维尔是第一个社会科学家，所以在写作过程中分版块来重新理解托克维尔的作品，当然很有新意，但是否能进入主流的见解呢？不得而知，我猜难。更何况Elster老爷子毕竟还是实证取向的政治科学家，有空再仔细念下……