The obsolescence of Tocqueville's new political science (Alex de Tocqueville)

Recent commentators have paid virtually no attention to the economic and industrial dimension of the Tocqueville's reflections on modern democratic society in Democracy in America. Yet Tocqueville's idea of modern democratic society was an economic and industrial conception to an even greater extent than it was a political or legal one. At the heart of Tocqueville's vision of democracy was the economically independent, proto-industrial proprietor. Reconstructing this obsolete figure, and the economic and industrial context that made him dominant, is the key to understanding the basic logic and meaning of the "new political science" Tocqueville presented. The conclusion is inevitable that Tocqueville failed to anticipate advanced industrialization, and that much, if not the whole, of his new political science was addressed to a form of society that has been superseded.