Tocqueville's Task as He Saw It

Tocqueville really did seem to set out to convey information about how American democracy felt to an observer. In his preface, he tells the reader:

In volume 2, he elaborates:

Tocqueville's conception of the importance of groups and what we now think of as “social capital” has been hugely important to me. I was the keynote speaker at the Libertarian Party National Convention in Denver, Colorado in May 2008, where we nominated Bob Barr for president (I know, I know). My thirty-minute address was more than one third either direct quotations or a discussion of points Tocqueville had made about how democracy “enfeebled” citizens, if they had no private groups or associations to draw on to organize locally.

Elster's Task as He Sees It

Elster's thesis is that Tocqueville was not a very good political philosopher (because Tocqueville had little interest in that direction), but that he was quite a good social scientist. If Tocqueville was the first social scientist, then Elster sees himself as the third (Marx came in the middle). The reason that the club is so exclusive is that the standards are pretty high: Elster sees a proper social science (borrowing a bit from Elster Reference Elster2007) as being grounded in the empirical world of human action, and having three foci: (1) motivations, (2) beliefs, and (3) exportable “mechanisms,” or generalizable causal patterns. Implicitly, Elster is arguing that the huge number of “social science” scholars that focus only on portions of these three core problems are making at most marginal contributions.

I have some sympathy with Elster's notion of “social science,” and the need to integrate motivations and belief formation in a causal explanation, having myself made a similar argument some time ago (Munger Reference Munger2000).

The point is that Elster's claim about Tocqueville bears scrutiny pretty well. Even if one wants to press the claim that Hobbes and Smith had social science achievements, their work was more in line with engineering and cause-effect theory than the “mechanisms” on which Elster claims we should focus.

Still, this leaves unanswered the question that likely occurs to many: What of Auguste Comte, perhaps the consensus choice for “first social scientist”? I suspect (and it's only a suspicion; Elster offers no reference to the man) that Comte seems more like a political philosopher, because of his quest to create a “religion of humanity.” More than a few people have claimed that the “first social science publication” was Comte's Reference Comte and Jones1819 “The General Separation of Opinions and Desires.” Now, let me note that I detest the “you didn't cite (blank)” criticism in a review, and I try to avoid using it. But in this case, I wonder.

Comte's inquiry was about a philosophy of human action. Some of his questions (I'm paraphrasing) were of the engineering sort: What should be the laws of human action? How do social laws operate, and where do they come from? And how do humans react to the social laws of the culture in which they find themselves? Interestingly, Comte and Tocqueville both had a concern with “cerebral hygiene” (hygiène cérébrale), by which they meant that one should never read on the subject of one's analysis until the analysis was complete (Swedberg Reference Swedberg2009, 101).

I suspect, as I noted above, that for Elster, Comte was a philosopher. He famously said, “The greatest problem, then, is to raise social feeling by artificial effort to the position which in the natural condition is held by selfish feeling” (Comte [1848] Reference Comte and Bridges2006, 68). To which Sir James Fitzjames Stephen ([1873] Reference Stephen1991, 126) later responded, “To me this is like saying, the great object of mechanics is to alter the laws of gravitation.” (Obviously one of those “public choice” cretins!) But I think that the central concerns for Comte were actually quite close to those of Tocqueville, perhaps because (as Swedberg Reference Swedberg2009 notes) they had both grown up in post–Revolutionary France, giving them a deep distrust of optimistic claims about either democracy or dictatorship.

So Elster's omission of Comte, if only as someone who later contended with Tocqueville for intellectual supremacy, is a mystery to me. Both Comte and Tocqueville saw conformism, or social pressures to act and even to think in certain ways, as powerful and potentially dangerous. Comte thought the danger lay in preventing a development of a truly collective consciousness, while Tocqueville's concerns were nearly the opposite. But the emphasis is clear in both.

Elster's treatment of Tocqueville's discussion of conformism is the best I have seen. We might contrast the ideas with those of Adam Smith in Theory of Moral Sentiments ([1759] Reference Smith2009), or more recently with Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit's The Political Economy of Esteem (Reference Brennan and Petit2004). The difference is that Smith saw the “exchange” of esteem as enormously beneficial, a practice that provides the basis for civil society and common feeling while at the same time fostering liberty. Tocqueville, as Elster documents persuasively, saw the “feigned refusal” of esteem to have two separate implications: First, the threat to withhold esteem and the implied threat of ostracism have a chilling effect on both thought and action. Second, the doling out of esteem may be no less “feigned” than withholding it. Elster's coverage of the topic, on pages 38 to 42, is very powerful.

In the final analysis, the claim that Tocqueville was the “first” social scientist may be a bit of a red herring. Elster's main goal seems to be to persuade the modern reader that Tocqueville is a very good social scientist, a thinker whose ideas and observations were and still are an important part of social science history. In this task, Prof. Elster has succeeded admirably, and he is to be commended.