Jon Elster has spent much of his career arguing in favor of a social science that focuses on “mechanisms” to explain human behavior. Against the view that our individual choices and actions can be explained through governing laws or theories of rational choice, Elster has defended mechanisms as carriers of extraordinary explanatory power. In an article that precedes the book reviewed here, he describes mechanisms as “frequently occurring and easily recognizable causal patterns that are triggered under generally unknown conditions or with indeterminate consequences”; they “allow us to explain but not predict.”Footnote ¹ A mechanism would help to explain, for example, why a revolution occurred in spite of the improvement of social conditions for the poor or why a particular society valued the study of Latin and Greek; it could also explain the reasons why societies marked by a high tolerance for financial risk would find comfort and stability in religious life.

In his new book, Alexis de Tocqueville: The First Social Scientist, Elster argues that Tocqueville deployed a highly developed and fully conscious set of models and mechanisms. Accordingly, Tocqueville deserves a place in the canon of social science and, more specifically, should be read as its founder. Elster's particular interpretation of Tocqueville is unorthodox, but a piece of it is very familiar. It follows in the long tradition of those who claim the authority of Tocqueville—“he who must be quoted,” in the words of Isaac Kramnick—to buttress or support their political or scholarly tradition.Footnote ²

In order to make his case for reading Tocqueville as a social scientist, Elster has culled and coded Tocqueville's most significant works (with support from notebooks and letters) in order to identify the social science mechanisms that Tocqueville allegedly deployed to explain the French and American contexts. The book walks readers through mechanisms ranging from the “spillover effect” and “adaptive preference formation” to “status consistency” and the more familiar “Tocqueville paradox” (which says that revolutions increase in likelihood as material conditions improve). These mechanisms are said to be exportable and useful for explaining human behavior beyond Tocqueville's particular settings.

Let us consider what this looks like on the page by way of a discussion of the spillover effect, which is a subset of a hydraulic mechanism that exists between “political and religious authority” (p. 14). The spillover effect “says that if a person follows a certain pattern of behavior P in one sphere of his life, X, he will also follow P in sphere Y” (p. 13). For example, the person who is uncivil in the office is likely uncivil at home. The disloyal friend is likely a disloyal advisor. It has a Tocquevillean ring, and Elster provides several examples to support it. These two are drawn from Democracy in America:

Elster lays out these and a dozen or so other “spillover effect” passages over the course of six pages. Within this discussion alone, he quotes Tocqueville on subjects as varied as economic risk, soldiering, skillful government, and democratic miracles. The diversity of the topics covered is intended to demonstrate the consistency with which Tocqueville returned to the same mechanisms to explain human activity. However, because Elster is so focused on drawing the connection between the contemporary mechanism and Tocqueville's text, he does not delve into the significance of the passages themselves (as has been the tradition of political theorists' engagement with Tocqueville). Given the extraordinary attention to the details of the texts, it is hard not to wish for some discussion of the broader, political questions raised by these examples.

Because Elster understands social science explanation and political theorizing as separate and mutually exclusive tasks, there can be no such discussion. If Tocqueville is, in fact, the “first social scientist,” Elster is clear to say that this means he is not a political theorist. For Elster, political theory includes a systematic and coherent theory that is designed to guide political and social action. John Rawls appears as the standard against which one measures all others, and Elster rightly notes that the “hugely incoherent structure” of Democracy in America means that Tocqueville is not a political theorist in the Rawlsian sense (p. 1).

To the extent that we get any window into Tocqueville's own normative commitments, they are fraught with ambiguity and contradiction and difficult to discern clearly. They are undoubtedly impossible to implement systematically. But another interpretation seems possible: Perhaps Tocqueville's frenetic effort to explain human behavior in a democratic context muddies the divide between social science explanation and political theorizing itself. That is to say, perhaps it is Tocqueville's investments in the political context and its dilemmas that shape his penchant for explanation. His desire to make sense of what has happened and why individuals have behaved in particular ways may be tied to his desire to shape the democratic future in an intelligent and humane way. He acknowledges the significance of specific historical context enough to back away from grand normative theorizing. But Tocqueville is nonetheless, as Cheryl Welch and Françoise Mélonio have noted so persuasively, invested in drawing some general conclusions about “democracy” and how France, in particular, might arrive there without sacrificing the civilizing mores that he believed were required by political egalitarianism.Footnote ³ That Elster himself draws a bright line between social science and political theorizing seems better to reflect contemporary debates within social science than Tocqueville's own work.

At the outset, Elster acknowledges the significant complications his project involves. In order to identify the recurring models and mechanisms at work in Tocqueville's books, he must find a way past the “constant ambiguity, vagueness of language, tendency to speculative flights of fancy, and self-contradictions”—“flaws” that are so abundant “in Democracy in America and, to a much lesser extent, in the generally more sober and coherent Ancien régime” (pp. 2–3). Elster dispenses with the ambiguities and vagueness and notes that the “speculative flights of fancy” are mostly limited to Volume II of Democracy in America, specifically with respect to “speculative explanations of various religious phenomena” (pp. 3–4). The contradictions are dismissed as “a side effect of [Tocqueville's] intense concentration on the matter at hand, which sometimes caused him to forget what he had written a few pages earlier” (p. 5; see also p. 26). Finally, he takes Tocqueville's lack of clarity more broadly to reflect an arrogant refusal to spell things out too clearly. He writes: “[Tocqueville] seems to have preferred to hide the scaffolding and pretend that he was simply telling a story…. Anything else would have smacked of pedantry and … abstract rationalism” (p. 5).

By Elster's own account, several reviewers of the original manuscript were not persuaded that Tocqueville's models and mechanisms were as conscious as Elster claimed. Elster responds that although he “cannot prove [it] to be true,” his “long acquaintance with Tocqueville's prickly and intensely private personality” and “dislike of pedantry” explains why Tocqueville would be reluctant to elucidate his models and mechanisms explicitly (p. 5, n. 4).

Ultimately, the chosen interpretive approach—whether referring to social science or political theory—seems to cast ambiguity as a “sin” from which the author needs redemption, rather than as something to be subjected to exegetical analysis (p. 12). The problem here is not simply the flattening out of the cacophony of political texts in a way that subverts their richness. It also represents at least two political problems. First, it treats contradiction, ambiguity, and speculation as “flaws” to be bracketed prior to the task of social explanation. As the struggle on the ground in Jacksonian America and postrevolutionary France revealed, newly democratic eras are fraught with—perhaps even constituted by—contradiction. In addition, by claiming that Tocqueville's inconsistencies can be resolved through an esoteric reading (see p. 5, n. 4), Elster ignores the ways in which Tocqueville's aristocratic attitudes and skepticism about the common person's intellectual capacities would shape the substance of his account of democracy and democratization, and potentially limit the exportability of this account as well. And finally, to speak in more methodological terms, eliding the nuance and substantive ambiguity in Tocqueville's work leaves little room for considering the ways in which contradictions and paradox might be built into the crafts of theorizing and writing.

To say that Elster fails to make the case that Tocqueville is, above all, a social scientist in the narrow sense is not to say that Tocqueville's work is incompatible with contemporary social science or has nothing to say to social scientists today. As Barbara Cruikshank has noted in her description of Tocqueville's reform efforts, “Tocqueville traveled, he wrote, studied, compared, and counted; he examined philanthropists in conversation and letters; he scrutinized the utility of various reform schemes tried in different associational, national, and colonial contexts.”Footnote ⁴ Rather, the problem pertains to Elster's preoccupation with the authority of Tocqueville as a badge of legitimacy—in this case for a particular contemporary social science project. Because of this preoccupation, Elster engages Tocqueville as an authority rather than an interlocutor, which ultimately closes down, rather than opens up, the conversation about the subjects—democratic ideas and democratic citizens—that animated Tocqueville's work. By taking this approach, Elster seems to have forgotten the power of Tocqueville's more humble and “softer” theorizing—the very reasons why he prefers Tocqueville's analysis to that of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber in the first place (pp. 6–7).

“In 1989,” laments Isaac Kramnick, “the United States Library of Congress … commemorated the bicentennial of the French Revolution … with an exhibition devoted to Tocqueville, who, of course, had nothing to do with 1789.”Footnote ⁵ Kramnick invokes this example to illustrate the hazardous ways in which Tocqueville is overquoted, often by people with little awareness of his work or life. He is quoted because he is Tocqueville, which is not reason enough. It would be too strong to say that Jon Elster quotes Tocqueville only because he is Tocqueville, or to deny a link between Tocqueville's explanatory tendencies and Elster's social science. But to see a link is not to see a legacy. This ambitious new book fares best where it teases out possible connections and affinities, and comes up short as it strains to make the case of inheritance.