ABSTRACT
This chapter on Alexis de Tocqueville is neither an internal nor an external critique. Instead, it presents an intellectual portrait and a self-portrait of Tocqueville, the latter insofar as it quotes extensively from Tocqueville’s correspondence. The chapter contains an “invented” comparison of Tocqueville’s and Karl Marx's views. Though Tocqueville was born thirteen years before Marx, and his life span was eleven years shorter, they were observers of the same social transformation: the transition from a preindustrial and aristocratic to an industrial and egalitarian society. Neither Marx nor Tocqueville wrote about methods of social inquiry in the currently fashionable manner. Yet both men reflected on how they went about understanding the society of their time. Marx’s reflections on method were largely of a philosophical kind. Tocqueville did more than argue in general from his situation for the objectivity of his approach.
