ABSTRACT
Tocqueville has been called the first modern social scientist (Elster 2009). Many would probably disagree that the French aristocrat-cum-democrat deserves this title. It seems less controversial to argue that Tocqueville is the first modern social scientist who practiced comparative historical analysis in a systematic way. Tocqueville did this in his two famous works, The Old Regime and the Revolution (henceforth OR) and Democracy in America (henceforth DA) (Lange 2012, 23-24). Tocqueville set out to understand the forces driving the staggering democratization process that had transformed Western societies. The aim of this chapter is to present and discuss Tocqueville’s analysis of regime change, including the notion of the general ascendancy of democracy and the particular juncture of the French Revolution.1
