ABSTRACT
Perhaps more than any other thinker since Aristotle, Tocqueville gave the phenomenon of revolution a central place in his political theory. For his principal concerns were to determine the preconditions of a free, stable, and constitutional regime and to explain why and how revolutions occur. Tocqueville's concern with revolution was lifelong. His great study of the United States was not least a consideration of how a democratic society, after a purely political revolution, was able to reconcile equality with liberty. Tocqueville's distinction among the religious, social, and political aspects of revolution, it would be even more useful if it included a consideration of economic arrangements before and after the resort to violence. Like Burke and Taine, Tocqueville believed that the world would be spared great convulsions if only there were no radical intellectuals or men of letters subverting society by their impractical speculations.
