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 Régime 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(s): Jon Elster
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2011
Language: English
Commentary: More best quality
Pages: 320
Half-title
Series-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Introduction
Bibliographical Note
Chronology
Foreword
Book I
I.1 – Contradictory Judgments of the Revolution at Its Inception
I.2 – That the Fundamental and Final Purpose of the Revolution Was Not, as Some Have Thought, to Destroy Religious Authority and Weaken Political Authority
I.3 – How the French Revolution Was a Political Revolution That Proceeded in the Manner of Religious Revolutions, and Why
I.4 – How Almost All of Europe Had Exactly the Same Institutions, and How Those Institutions Were Crumbling Everywhere
I.5 – What Was the Essential Achievement of the French Revolution?
Book II
II.1 – Why Feudal Prerogatives Had Become More Odious to the People in France Than Anywhere Else
II.2 – Why Administrative Centralization Is an Institution of the Ancien Régime and Not, As Some Say, the Work of the Revolution or Empire
II.3 – How What Today Is Called Administrative Tutelage Is an Institution of the Ancien Régime
II.4 – How Administrative Justice and the Immunity of Public Officials Were Institutions of the Ancien Régime
II.5 – How Centralization Was Thus Able to Insinuate Itself among the Old Powers and Supplant Them Without Destroying Them
II.6 – On Administrative Mores under the Ancien Régime
II.7 – 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
II.8 –That France Was the Country Where People Had Become Most Alike
II.9 – How Men So Similar Were More Separate Than Ever, Divided into Small Groups Alien and Indifferent to One Another
II.10 – How the Destruction of Political Liberty and the Separation of Classes Caused Nearly All the Maladies That Proved Fatal to the Ancien Régime
II.11 – On the Kind of Liberty to Be Found under the Ancien Régime and Its Influence on the Revolution
II.12 – 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
Book III
III.1 – How, Toward the Middle of the Eighteenth Century, Men of Letters Became the Country’s Leading Politicians, and the Effects That Followed from This
III.2 – How Irreligion Was Able to Become a General and Dominant Passion in Eighteenth-Century France, and How It Influenced the Character of the Revolution
III.3 – How the French Wanted Reforms Before They Wanted Liberties
III.4 – That the Reign of Louis XVI Was the Most Prosperous Era of the Old Monarchy, and How That Very Prosperity Hastened the Revolution
III.5 – How Attempts to Relieve the People Stirred Them to Revolt
III.6 – On Some Practices That Helped the Government Complete the People’s Revolutionary Education
III.7 – How a Great Administrative Revolution Preceded the Political Revolution, and on the Consequences It Had
III.8 – How the Revolution Emerged Naturally from the Foregoing
Appendix: On the Pays d’états, and in Particular Languedoc
Notes
Index
