I have always wondered what would have happened if Tocqueville were alive today and submitted Democracy in America as a doctoral dissertation in social sciences. Would departments that stress statistical and quantitative skills be willing to give him a pass? I doubt it. Although Tocqueville was among the first to do serious “fieldwork,” many of our fellow political scientists would probably criticize him for lacking a clear “dependent variable” and working with (far) too many meanings of democracy, creating unacceptable confusion and tension. What is beyond doubt is that Tocqueville's writings remain a notoriously difficult subject for his interpreters and a surprisingly elusive target for his critics. Some have praised him for his “prophecies” and original insights into the nature of modern democracy; others have criticized him for having “imagined” America or having relied upon an incoherent conceptual apparatus. We do not know what he really believed. Was he an aristocrat, a convinced or resigned democrat? A liberal or a conservative? And we wonder if he was first and foremost a historian, political philosopher, or social scientist. Recent scholarship has revealed new faces of Tocqueville: the philosopher, the moralist, the writer on empire, the economistFootnote ¹ that further complicate the picture.

To all of these new aspects of Tocqueville's work Jon Elster has now added another one: Tocqueville the precursor of game theory. Elster's reputation as one of the most innovative contemporary social scientists needs no further presentation. Would he give Tocqueville's hypothetical “dissertation” a pass? At first sight, the mere fact that Elster has written an entire book on Tocqueville in which he acknowledges that the Frenchman remains an inspiration for us today might suggest that he would have enthusiastically endorsed Tocqueville's approach. He praises Tocqueville's work for its “fine-grained analysis of a given society or regime” that takes into account the role of time and the dynamic of social mobility, along with what Elster calls “exportable causal mechanisms” (p. 187). Moreover, as he mentions in the preface, reading Tocqueville's Democracy in America put him “in such a state of intellectual and nervous excitement” (p. vii) that he could not sit still and had to get up from his chair and walk around. Having experienced the same thing upon reading Tocqueville, I deeply sympathize with Elster's point. What I find odd, however, is that someone who had such an intense experience with reading Tocqueville would also be so enamored of rational choice theory that he would come to think of Democracy in America as an incoherent book.

That is why, for all its virtues, Alexis de Tocqueville, the First Social Scientist is a simultaneously strange and interesting book, one that, in its best moments, reminds me of Albert Hirschman's witty The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991) and in its less inspired moments, recalls Garry Wills's superficial critique of Tocqueville in the New York Review of Books (Reference Wills2004).Footnote ² By seeking to convince its readers “how close Tocqueville came to formulating (but not formalizing) basic insights of game theory” (p. 187), Elster's book might make Tocqueville appealing to an audience that otherwise might never bother to read him. But how good was Tocqueville as social scientist? Elster is not shy at acknowledging the latter's many—perhaps too many—shortcomings.

In an article published in 2006, Elster argued that “the main flaw in Tocqueville's analysis is that it is sometimes too systematic. Oscillating between intentional and functional explanation, he strives to find meaning in what were more plausibly accidental or incidental outcomes of political struggles.”Footnote ³ In his new book, he complains that Tocqueville was not a systematic thinker and that he failed to provide a new political science. In his view, Tocqueville's masterpiece has a “hugely incoherent structure” (p. 1), marred by “constant ambiguity, vagueness of language, tendency to speculative flights of fancy, and self-contradictions” (p. 2). The author also takes Tocqueville to task for “not being clear enough to be wrong” (p. 3) and for “recklessly” generalizing from a few examples, thus leaving readers in constant confusion as to which country he is referring to (America, France). The first three chapters of the second volume of Democracy are, in his opinion, “hopelessly confused” (p. 29), and the famous introduction to the first volume is guilty of “excessive reliance on general ideas” (p. 35).To make things worse, Elster's Tocqueville also had a mixed record of predictions.

How can anyone with so many academic sins be a good social scientist, and how can one admire such a flawed thinker? Elster does not intend to destroy Tocqueville's star status, as one might infer from the aforementioned charges. On the contrary, he pretends to offer a “rehabilitation” of Tocqueville as social scientist, a “rational reconstruction” offering “a conceptual framework that seems consistent with the texts while being occasionally more explicit and elaborate in his own sentiments” (p. 47). Tocqueville's works, he claims, are “filled to the brim with small and medium-sized casual mechanisms and highly sophisticated methodological insights” (p. vii). The nine chapters of Elster's book examine these mechanisms with regard to preference and belief formation, self-interest and individualism, passions, desires and opportunities, patterns of social causality, equality and mobility, democratic government, and revolution. The value of Tocqueville's analysis, Elster argues, does not lie in the formulation of laws but in the uncovering of these “mechanisms” that help explain how our societies function. On this view, Tocqueville was somewhat “aware” of the free-rider obstacles to collective action, identified the structure of an Assurance Game by approaching it through the concept of “pluralistic ignorance,” and arguably pointed out many spillover, compensation, and satiation effects and mechanisms in his analysis of the virtues and limitations of democracy.

Elster's attempt to highlight Tocqueville's contribution as social scientist is neither a novel approach nor an against-the-tide undertaking, as he claims. For decades now, in both France and the United States, Tocqueville has been acknowledged as an important social scientist in departments of sociology and political science. For example, Melvin Richter interpreted Tocqueville as a continuator of Montesquieu,Footnote ⁴ and he did so in the footsteps of Raymond Aron, one of Elster's former teachers in Paris, quoted in the bibliography but never properly discussed in the book. This is highly regrettable since Tocqueville looms large in the first volume of Aron's Main Currents of Sociological Thought (Reference Aron1998), along with Montesquieu, Comte, and Marx, all major social scientists. Long before Elster, Aron showed how Tocqueville's method and conclusions differed from those of Comte and Marx and how he highlighted certain structural traits of modern society and the primacy of the political sphere vis-à-vis the economic and social. Tocqueville's most important innovation, Aron demonstrated, was to examine democracy as a new type of society, rather than a form of power. As a good student of Montesquieu, Tocqueville established a hierarchy among the causes he mentioned (geography, history, laws, religion customs, mores), emphasizing the importance of moeurs. As a precursor of Weber, he worked with ideal types, aristocracy and democracy.

It is surprising and regrettable that Elster does not engage with some of Aron's claims or with the analyses of Raymond Boudon, Saguiv Hadari, and Pierre Birnbaum, who also wrote entire books on Tocqueville as social scientist,Footnote ⁵ in which they showed that Tocqueville carefully traced macrosocial effects to the rational motivations and choices of individuals and groups placed in specific economic, political, and social contexts. Alas, Elster decided to ignore the rich secondary literature because responding to it, in his own words, “would have broken the flow of the argument” (p. 9). Unfortunately, not only is this idiosyncratic decision disrespectful of a rich secondary literature containing a few classic books, which everyone must reckon with, but it also diminishes the relevance of some of Elster's arguments, inviting other Tocqueville scholars to ignore, in turn, his new book. If he took this risk willingly and defiantly, it was not a prudent one. It led him to overstate some of his points about Tocqueville's “mechanisms,” repeat what others had said before him, or lose sight of alternative viewpoints about how Tocqueville came to write his major works. To prove these points I give four examples.

First, a proper assessment of Tocqueville's methodology as social scientist is hardly possible without paying due consideration to the particular problems from which he started and the complex milieu from which his works emerged. Because Elster is not interested in this, he sometimes risks misunderstanding Tocqueville's message, as when analyzing egoism and individualism, two topics on which, as Lucien Jaume has demonstrated, Tocqueville was probably influenced by Felicité de Lammenais and Alexandre Vinet.Footnote ⁶ Jaume also called our attention to the importance of authority in Tocqueville's works, a key concept barely discussed in Elster's book. Furthermore, it is a pity that Elster never mentions François Furet, whose analysis of Tocqueville's conceptual vocabulary remains an indispensable (though by no means infallible) point of departure for any Tocqueville scholar. Although Françoise Mélonio's Tocqueville and the French (Reference Mélonio and Raps1998), a fundamental reference, is listed on the bibliography, Elster does not really engage with the main ideas of the book.Footnote ⁷

Second, the reader of Chapter 9 (“Revolution”) of Elster's book will have no idea that, in writing The Old Regime and the Revolution, Tocqueville was engaged in a seminal dialogue with Burke and other French thinkers (Benjamin Constant, Louis-Antoine Macarel, and C. Dareste de la Chavanne) who influenced his views and the tone of his book. Burke, Tocqueville argued, did not realize that the Revolution was not a mere French accident and that its fundamental objective was the pursuit of equality (of conditions) that could not have been stopped by any legislator. This important point is missing from Elster's analysis. Moreover, although he is a great fan of L'Ancien régime et la révolution, he never mentions the vast laboratory and notes from which the volume emerged, a topic addressed by Robert Gannett.Footnote ⁸ Amounting to approximately 3,700 pages preserved in the archives, these notes give us a glimpse into Tocqueville's sources and methodology, including his writing blocks and doubts.

Third, while Elster is right to insist that Tocqueville opposed rigid deterministic theories of political and social development, the reader of his book will hardly realize that Tocqueville's social science approach was incomparably more political than that of Marx and Comte. Tocqueville had a strong passion for political action—“I have always placed action above everything else,”Footnote ⁹ he once confessed to Louis de Kergorlay—and dreamt of playing an important role in politics. Since in Tocqueville's case we have a social scientist with a great political ambition, it is legitimate to ask if he ever “consummated” his love for politics. The reader of Elster's book stands to gain very little insight into Tocqueville's own political choices during his career as deputy. To give just one example, in 1842 and 1847, Tocqueville viewed universal suffrage as a threat to democracy and voted against expansion of the suffrage to include more citizens with a right to vote.Footnote ¹⁰ In 1848, he changed his mind and endorsed universal suffrage as being compatible with a stable democracy. Why did he do it and how did he justify it? Elster insists on Tocqueville's warning against the effectiveness of half measures but does not shed light on this important issue.

Fourth, Elster would have benefited greatly from drawing closely upon Eduardo Nolla's (indispensable) critical edition of Democracy in America Footnote ¹¹ which gives us the opportunity to see the laboratory from which Tocqueville's masterpiece emerged, as well as his method and writing style. If he occasionally uses a few notes published in the second volume of Œuvres Complètes in Pléiade (coedited by James Schleifer and Jean-Claude Lamberti), they constitute only a small part of the material collected in Eduardo Nolla's critical edition. Sometimes Tocqueville chooses to carry his readers along by logic, while at other times he relies on metaphors and evocative examples, parallel structures and contrasting pairs, in order to make his points more persuasively.Footnote ¹² Elster criticizes Tocqueville for his alleged vagueness and contradictions, but he fails to notice that in his unpublished notes, Tocqueville engages in a fascinating dialogue with himself, as well as with his father Hervé, his brother Édouard, and his friends Gustave de Beaumont and Louis de Kergorlay. Tocqueville constantly drafts outlines and writing strategies and painstakingly weighs his choices of words, reflecting upon the proper definitions of key concepts.

Above all, these notes show that the vagueness that Elster dislikes so much was a highly calculated strategy on the part of Tocqueville, who deliberately refrained from relying too much on his rich notes. I mention here briefly only the notion of democracyFootnote ¹³ to suggest that the conceptual ambiguity surrounding this key term should be viewed as a token of Tocqueville's intention to offer a broader definition of democracy as an open social, anthropological, philosophical, and political phenomenon. The notes for the introduction to Volume I of Democracy in America shed light on Tocqueville's complex attitude toward democracy, which he went so far as to compare with the waters of the flood.Footnote ¹⁴ The notes for the chapter examining the advantages and pathologies of democratic government are equally fascinating. If Elster had paid close attention to them, he would have discovered Tocqueville exchanging interesting ideas with his brother and father about the shortcomings of democracy and American democracy in particular, and the possible confusion between the two. Édouard de Tocqueville criticized this chapter for being “very favorable to the government of democracy at the expense of other governments” and invited his brother to “show democratic government a little less favorably and make a bit more use of the dubitative form”Footnote ¹⁵ in order to avoid passing for an Americanized Frenchman. Alexis responded (in a note to himself) that he was afraid that “some might suppose that I wanted to praise the American republic, and given this fear, I wanted to extend what I said about America to democracy in general.”Footnote ¹⁶ This explains the careful strategy he follows here, as well as in the last chapter of Volume II, which went through several drafts (to be found in the notes). In one of these, Tocqueville stages an imaginary dialogue with the opponents of democracy and concludes that only democratic principles and institutions can save democracy from its evils.Footnote ¹⁷

Tocqueville may have been a modern social scientist avant la lettre, as Elster, Boudon, Birnbaum, and Hadari have argued, but one may wonder if he ever believed in the possibility of a comprehensive science of society. In my view, his works must be interpreted as belonging to a larger French tradition of political engagement and political rhetoric (rather than social science) in which the writer enters into a subtle and complex pedagogical relationship with his audience, seeking to convince and inspire it.Footnote ¹⁸ Unfortunately, Elster's book, so focused on unearthing Tocqueville's alleged mechanisms, has little to say about this normative element of his thought. It does not really explain his tendency to deduce broad philosophical pictures from a narrow set of specific facts, and it does not shed light on the contrast between Tocqueville's quest for general laws and universal causes and his immersion in particular facts and attention to historical contingencies.Footnote ¹⁹

This is no minor point since Tocqueville claimed that the modern democratic world needs a new science of politics. Unfortunately, Elster does not have much to say about this seminal topic. He argues that Tocqueville failed to deliver such a new science, but the reader is left wondering why. It would have been useful, perhaps, to comment on Tocqueville's important (and often overlooked) speech on the science of politics that he gave in Paris in April 1852. Addressing the members of the Academy of Moral and Political Science, he drew a seminal distinction between the art of government and the science of government, and insisted on the scientific nature of his approach to the study of politics.Footnote ²⁰ Tocqueville's new science of politics was not value neutral. Although he pretended to be an impartial observer standing between two worlds and casting a neutral look on both of them, in reality he had strong preferences. His praise of political freedom in The Old Regime and the Revolution (II: 11; III: 3) is an eloquent case in point, and it is surprising that the theme of liberty is underplayed in Elster's book (only a few paragraphs on pp. 106, 120, and 186), as are the issues of the tyranny of the majority and democratic despotism. Tocqueville's new science of politics relied upon all of these concepts. It aspired to avoid historical determinism and was intended to countervail any attempt to rob individual human beings of their freedom and dignity.

The main contribution of Elster's book is to show how Tocqueville's psychological depth can be extrapolated from his thought, made scientific, and brought to the attention of modern social scientists and game theorists. Nonetheless, for all the sophisticated mechanisms and effects that Elster sees in Tocqueville, he loses sight of the real Tocqueville, and his rehabilitation, as Ralph Lerner has pointed out, “makes a plausible case for social scientists to continue ignoring Tocqueville,”Footnote ²¹ whose many shortcomings are endlessly exposed here. Some might feel that in using scientific jargon to describe Tocqueville's approach, Elster unnecessarily complicates the picture and fails to account for his real method; others might think that Elster raises the bar in doing so. As usual, the truth is in between. Some of the “mechanisms” and effects that Elster finds in Tocqueville's writings, such as the fear of success, the spillover and compensation effects, the Tocqueville paradox (regarding subjective discontent and the likelihood of revolution), or “secondhand” arguments, are witty and attractive. But are they really helpful in making us understand what Tocqueville tried to do?

Two passages from Tocqueville's rich correspondence come to mind. “Independently of the serious interest I take in the opinions others may hold of me,” Tocqueville wrote to Henry Reeve in 1837, “it delights me to see the different features that are given to me according to the political passions of the person who cites me. It is a collection of portraits that I like to assemble. To the present day, I have not yet found one of them that completely looked like me.”Footnote ²² In another letter to Eugène Stoffels, Tocqueville revealed the secret of his curious popularity: “I please many persons of conflicting opinions not because they understand me, but because they find in my work, by considering it only from a single side, arguments favorable to their passion of the moment.”Footnote ²³ In my view, this is the best commentary that one could make on Elster's book. He wants to make Tocqueville a game theorist or a rational choice type of social scientist avant la lettre, but in the end, Tocqueville was none of that (or much more than that). He had one big passion—liberty and human dignity—for which he fought to the end of his life.

Elster's book, which defiantly overlooks a rich body of secondary literature (including classic works in this field), gives a simplified and distorted image of Tocqueville's works. The author I love and to whom I always return with great pleasure is Tocqueville the political philosopher (who cares about freedom and our souls) and the genuine architect of language (in the best tradition of the French moralists).Footnote ²⁴ It is not the social scientist who unveiled spillover and compensation mechanisms and was allegedly concerned with the shortcomings of half measures, the benefits of political myopia, and “safety valves.” While this latter “Tocqueville” may enhance certain methods of contemporary social science, he is a pale and bloodless facsimile of the original.