Tocqueville: The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution

by Edited by Jon Elster , Translated by Arthur Goldhammer

• ISBN13: 9780521718912
• ISBN10: 0521718910
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-06-20
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

"This new translation of an undisputed classic aims to be both accurate and readable. Tocqueville's subtlety of style and profundity of thought offer a challenge to readers as well as to translators. As both a Tocqueville scholar and an award-winning translator, Arthur Goldhammer is uniquely qualified for the task. In his Introduction, Jon Elster draws on his recent work to lay out the structure of Tocqueville's argument. Readers will appreciate The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution for its sense of irony as well as tragedy, for its deep insights into political psychology, and for its impassioned defense of liberty"--

Author Biography

Jon Elster has taught at the Universit de Paris VIII, the University of Oslo, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and the Collge de France. He is the author of twenty-three books translated into 17 t languages, including Ulysses and the Sirens (1973), Sour Grapes (1983), Making Sense of Marx (1985), Alchemies of the Mind (1999), Explaining Social Behavior (Cambridge 2007), Le dsintressement (2009), Alexis de Tocqueville: The First Social Scientist (Cambridge 2009), and L'Irrationalit (2010). Professor Elster is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Norwegian Academy of Science, and Academia Europaea and is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Arthur Goldhammer has translated more than a hundred works from French, including Tocqueville's Democracy in America. He is a three-time recipient of the French-American Foundation translation prize. France made him a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and the Acadmie Franaise awarded him its Mdaille de Vermeil.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. xiii
Bibliographical Note	p. xxix
Chronology	p. xxxi
Foreword	p. 1
Contradictory Judgments of the Revolution at Its Inception	p. 11
That the Fundamental and Final Purpose of the Revolution Was Not, as Some Have Thought, to Destroy Religious Authority and Weaken Political Authority	p. 15
How the French Revolution Was a Political Revolution That Proceeded in the Manner of Religious Revolutions, and Why	p. 19
How Almost All of Europe Had Exactly the Same Institutions, and How Those Institutions Were Crumbling Everywhere	p. 22
What Was the Essential Achievement of the French Revolution?	p. 26
Why Feudal Prerogatives Had Become More Odious to the People in France Than Anywhere Else	p. 31
Why Administrative Centralization Is an Institution of the Ancien Régime and Not, As Some Say, the Work of the Revolution or Empire	p. 30
How What Today Is Called Administrative Tutelage Is an Institution of the Ancien Régime	p. 47
How Administrative Justice and the Immunity of Public Officials Were Institutions of the Ancien Régime	p. 55
How Centralization Was Thus Able to Insinuate Itself among the Old Powers and Supplant Them Without Destroying Them	p. 59
On Administrative Mores under the Ancien Régime	p. 62
How France, of All the Countries of Europe, Was Already the One in Which the Capital Had Achieved the Greatest Preponderance over the Provinces and Most Fully Subsumed the Entire Country	p. 71
That France Was the Country Where People Had Become Most Alike	p. 76
How Men So Similar Were More Separate Than Ever, Divided into Small Groups Alien and Indifferent to One Another	p. 80
How the Destruction of Political Liberty and the Separation of Classes Caused Nearly All the Maladies That Proved Fatal to the Ancien Régime	p. 93
On the Kind of Liberty to Be Found under the Ancien Régime and Its Influence on the Revolution	p. 102
How, Despite the Progress of Civilization, the Condition of the French Peasant Was Sometimes Worse in the eighteenth Century Than It Had Been in the Thirteenth	p. 112
How, Toward the Middle of the eighteenth Century, Men of Letters Became the Country's Leading Politicians, and the Effects That Followed from This	p. 127
How Irreligion Was Able to Become a General and Dominant Passion in eighteenth-Century France, and How It Influenced the Character of the Revolution	p. 136
How the French Wanted Reforms Before They Wanted Liberties	p. 143
That the Reign of Louis XVI Was the Most Prosperous Era of the Old Monarchy, and How That Very Prosperity Hastened the Revolution	p. 152
How Attempts to Relieve the People Stirred Them to Revolt	p. 160
On Some Practices That Helped the Government Complete the People's Revolutionary Education	p. 166
How a Great Administrative Revolution Preceded the Political Revolution, and on the Consequences It Had	p. 170
How the Revolution Emerged Naturally from the Foregoing	p. 179
Appendix: On the Pays d'état, and in Particular Languedoc	p. 187
Notes	p. 197
Index	p. 271
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