Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville has been widely hailed and extensively analyzed as a perceptive and brilliant commentator on American society; as a profound prophet; as a theorist of mass society; as an original thinker on the history and sociology of revolutions and, to a lesser extent, as a political figure involved in and around the Revolution of 1848 in France. However, his work has not been extensively analyzed from the standpoint of comparative analysis, even though his comparative emphasis is widely appreciated. In this part of the course we are undertaking such an analysis, which is based on Tocqueville's two classic works: Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the French Revolution. The analysis is based on Neil Smelser's book Comparative Methods in The Social Sciences. Smelser treats the Tocqueville's two books as a single study in order to analyze Tocqueville's comparative strategies.
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