Reforming Tocqueville

“Tocqueville,” wrote Lynn L. Marshall and Seymour Drescher in 1968, “enjoys such vogue among current American historians of the [antebellum] period that a proposal to analyze his usefulness as an historical source seems perhaps an entirely unnecessary exercise.” Few would make such a claim in the 1980s. Even as Marshall and Drescher wrote, a continuing stream of social historians had begun the process of transforming the prevailing view of nineteenth-century America. Many of these scholars-now ranging in age from early ’30 to early ’50s--could hardly have escaped Tocqueville and Tocquevillians in their undergraduate and graduate years. Yet they gained their new understanding of American society largely without or in opposition to him. While critics properly point to the “absent Marx” as a striking feature of American historiography, the recent near absence of Tocqueville is equally striking, particularly among historians who write about the nineteenth-century America whose analyst and theorist he was. Tocqueville’s stock fell as that of twentiethcentury thinkers like Clifford Geertz, Antonio Gramsci, and E.P. Thompson rose.