The other key to Elster's analysis of Tocqueville is his focus on features of the actor - reason, interests, and passions, or what Tocqueville refers to as 'habits of the heart'.Īmong the social mechanisms that Elster focuses on are those that surround preference formation. Elster believes that the most important feature of Tocqueville's claim to being a sociologist is his consistent search for causes.

One is Elster's view that Tocqueville operated on the basis of a conception of social explanation that depended on social mechanisms rather than general laws. There are several elements of Elster's interpretation of Tocqueville that seem particularly significant. So Elster is forced to engage in a fair amount of rational reconstruction of the theories that underlay a variety of Tocqueville's observations about the politics of France and America. Instead, it is necessary to infer his theoretical ideas from the comments he makes about historical events and actors. At the same time, Tocqueville is not really a theoretical writer. So Elster's Tocqueville is textually well supported. So Elster's treatment of Tocqueville as a social scientist in Alexis de Tocqueville, the First Social Scientist will be of interest to anyone who wants to know how we have come to analyze societies in the terms we have.Įlster demonstrates a deep familiarity with Tocqueville's writings, though he focuses in this book on L'Ancien regime and Democracy in America. Jon Elster is one of the people whose thinking about society and the social sciences has made a consistently important contribution to the philosophy of social science.

Elster online 2013