Tocqueville's new political science [Tocquevilles plädoyer für eine neue politische wissenschaft]

Tocqueville's influence has been less pronounced than that of several of his contemporaries, e.g. Guizot or Auguste Comte, but he is closer to us: not only is he a great figure in the history of ideas, he provides us with tools and ideas which help us in understanding modern societies. His deep originality, of which he was fully aware, is to a large extent the consequence of his methodology. The "new science of politics" he developed is characterized by five features. 1) It rests upon the principle of value neutrality. It follows the objective of explaining social and political phenomena by procedures used by all sciences. 2) It gives central strategic value to comparative analysis. 3) It pays central attention to the discovery of conditional laws, i.e. "if A, then B", and interprets these laws as being driven by understandable motivations and reasons on the part of individual social actors. 4) It identifies typical social mechanisms and processes. 5) It defines implicitly the notion of "good theory" by the criteria accepted by modem epistemologists. The accuracy and validity of Tocqueville's methodology is responsible for the force of his analyses in the second volume of Democracy in America and in The Old Regime and the Revolution, the two works more particularly taken into consideration here. Thanks to his methodology, he was able to identify a number of significant and important trends characterizing modern societies and the French society in particular. Hence the impression of eternal youth the reader easily experiences when reading his more than one and a half century old work.