ABSTRACT
More essays and reviews on Tocqueville’s work have appeared during the past decade than at any other time since his death in 1859. “Of all the projections of social development written at the juncture of the industrial and democratic revolutions in Western Europe, or, at least at the moment of greatest psychological impact, Alexis de Tocqueville’s remains one of the most enduring and remarkable,” writes Professor Seymour Drescher in the Introduction to Dilemmas of Democracy: Tocqueville and Modernization. 1 “It takes its place beside the optimistic vision of a scientific-industrial society, forecast by the Saint-Simonians and Positivists, and the specter of total crisis and transformation prophesied by Marx.”
