__________________________________________________________________ Javier Calderón The Political Psychology of Alexis de Tocqueville : An Appraisal of his Account of the French Revolution Introduction As mentioned by Alexander Bain in 1859 , one of the first “ scientific ” psychologists , “ in every willful human action the stimulus and antecedent is an emotion .” 1 However , more often than not , the influence emotions have on the behavior of individuals and collectivities and their influence on human history have been disregarded in the political , economic , and sociological sciences . Structures , institutions , systems , principles and reason have been fundamental categories used to explain human power relationships , but emotions seem to have been relegated only to the realm of psychology and those hard sciences that deal directly with the study of the brain and / or the mind . But , in the face of a resurgence of behavioral analyses for the study of economics , politics and other social phenomena , it seems relevant to bring back the role emotions have in complex social relationships . It is then , in this resurgence of behavioral social analyses that Tocqueville ’ s work , on what Jon Elster ( 1993 ; 101-102 ) 1 Alexander Bain , The Emotion and The Will ( London : John W . Park & Son , 1859 ), p . 36 . Javier Calderón ( M . A . en Teoría Política , New York University , 2009 ) es profesor de filosofía política en la Universidad Francisco Marroquín . Este artículo será también publicado en el Journal of Political Inquiry ( Department of Politics , New York University ). has termed “ equilibrium analysis ”, becomes relevant again for both political science and political philosophy . Departing from a comparative historical study of the political life of America , and of the development of the French revolutions of 1789 and 1848 , among others , Tocqueville discovered how institutions influence beliefs , expectations and social positions of people , how those beliefs and expectations affect the emotional status of collectivities , and how in turn those emotions affect human social behavior . It is his understanding of the interrelationship between institutions , beliefs , emotions and actions , and his comparison between reason and instincts or passions 2 that complements the already existing research programs of political theory ( i . e . rational choice , structuralism and culture studies ). And it is because of these understandings and this complementariness that it is important to retrieve the work of Tocqueville and expand the research done on his ideas beyond Democracy in America , his historic-comparative method , and his description of the 19th century western world . Hence , aiming at resurrecting some of Tocqueville ’ s main contributions to the social sciences and at evaluating some of 2 Arthur Goldhammer , “ Translating Tocqueville : The Constraints of Classicism ,” in Cheryl Welch , ed ., The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2006 ), p . 152 . Laissez-Faire , No . 32 ( Marzo 2010 ): 76-88

__________________________________________________________________ its contemporary interpretations , especially Jon Elster ’ s interpretation of “ Tocqueville ’ s Paradox ”, this paper will seek to achieve three goals : 1 ) first , to give an accurate description of Tocqueville ’ s psychological analysis of revolutions , especially the French Revolution ; 2 ) second , to evaluate some of the contemporary understandings of Tocqueville ’ s political psychology ; and 3 ) third , to rediscover Tocqueville ’ s social psychology in the light of the behavioral approaches to understanding human politics . In order to achieve these goals this paper will focus on Tocqueville ’ s The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution , arguing that , for Tocqueville , the revolutionary behavior of the French peasantry during the French Revolution was elicited by a new set of political beliefs against the old feudal political institutions . According to Tocqueville , this behavior was elicited by the ill emotions ( i . e ., hatred and envy ) 3 that these new sets of political beliefs directed against the French feudal political order . The objective of Section 1 is to develop a general review of contemporary authors ’ work on Tocqueville ’ s political psychology , and to place this study in the modern context . And , although the focus will be on Jon Elster ’ s work on Tocqueville ’ s political psychology , I will also address other authors such as Arthur Goldhammer and Whitney Pope . Section 2 will analyze how the evolution and existence of disharmonized political institutions create an unfairness effect in societies . This unfairness effect , in Tocqueville ’ s analysis of the French Revolution , is composed of those beliefs and ill emotions that the French peasantry directed against the existing political order . The effect is caused by the existence of a social and political order that imposes relatively heavy costs on the population , with respect to their perceived social utility . This effect will be analyzed in the three institutional disharmonies mentioned in Tocqueville ’ s Ancien Regime : 1 ) the ceasing of serfdom and the consequent surging of a small landowning peasantry ; 2 ) the nobles ’ loss of political functions at the hands of the kings ’ bureaucrats ; and 3 ) the keeping of the nobles ’ fiscal privileges and exemptions in the face of an increasing number and amount of royal taxes imposed on the commoners . Section 3 will describe and analyze how institutional circumstances influence beliefs and emotions , especially the unfairness effect , and how these beliefs and emotions in turn influence the political behavior of the people . This section will describe Tocqueville ’ s account of how beliefs were influenced by the evolution of the political institutions in France up to the 18th century , and how they created an unfairness effect among the peasantry . Secondly , it will analyze how emotions , as part of the human agency process , determined the violent and revolutionary behavior of the French peasantry against the old feudal order . Finally , the conclusions will address the main findings of the present paper , especially the results of the evaluation of the work that contemporary scholars have done on Tocqueville , Tocqueville ’ s use of political psychology to analyze political processes , the value of a psychological research program in the political 3 Jon Elster , “ Tocqueville on 1789 : Preconditions , Precipitants and Triggers ,” in Cheryl Welch , ed ., The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2006 ), p . 56 . __________________________________________________________________ Laissez-Faire 77

__________________________________________________________________ science field , and its implications for the relevance of other research programs . I . The “ Rediscoverers ” of Alexis de Tocqueville . Alexis de Tocqueville may be one of the most important political thinkers of the 19th century , 4 however , as mentioned by Cheryl Welch ( 2006 ; 1-6 ), his writings were almost forgotten from the time of his passing until the 20th century . Even then , it was only in 1938 that a major work on Tocqueville ’ s work was done , and only in the 1950 ’ s that his ideas started to appeal to a broader scholarly public . 5 Moreover it took almost half a century , with Jon Elster ’ s book on Political Psychology ( 1993 ), to produce systematic research on Tocqueville ’ s political and social psychology , and thirteen more years for Elster to publish the most important work ever done to date , namely , Tocqueville : The First Social Scientist ( 2009 ). It is a shared assumption among Tocqueville scholars that his interest in the human soul , what we now call his social and political psychology , started with Guizot ’ s teachings of history and his preoccupation for the underlying causes 6 of history . Like Aristotle , Tocqueville 4 Jon Elster , Political Psychology ( New York : Cambridge University Press , 1993 ), p . 101 . 5 Cheryl Welch , “ Introduction : Tocqueville in the Twenty-First Century ,” in Cheryl Welch , ed ., The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2006 ), pp . 1-6 . believed that political scientists must be concerned with the character of human souls in order for their theories to be legitimate . 7 Interest and passions , 8 or as Pope and Pope ( 1986 ; 43 ) call them , material and in-material interests , became the most important motivators in Tocqueville ’ s social psychology , with envy and hatred at their core . 9 However , as described by Arthur Goldhammer ( 2006 ; 152-158 ) there were other sources , especially Pascal ’ s theories of the mind , which finished shaping Tocqueville ’ s psychological theories . For Goldhammer , the “ right relation of rationality to instincts ” was a matter that concerned Tocqueville deeply , following Pascal , as “ the heart has reasons ” of which our conscience is not aware . 10 That is to say , Tocqueville was interested in those motivators , those triggers that made men act , but over which he had no control or of which he was not consciously aware , as instincts or passions . Moreover , this understanding of man ’ s motivators and of the right relation of reason to instincts was the foundation of a new political science formulated by Tocqueville . 11 ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2006 ), p . 22 . 7 Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop , “ Tocqueville ’ s New Political Science ,” in Cheryl Welch , ed ., The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2006 ), p . 83 . 8 Elster , Political Psychology , p . 143 . 9 Elster , “ Tocqueville on 1789 ,” p . 56 . 10 Goldhammer , “ Translating Tocqueville ,” 6 Seymour Drescher , “ Tocqueville ’ s Compa- p . 152 . rative Perspectives ,” in Cheryl Welch , ed ., 11 The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville Ibid . __________________________________________________________________ Laissez-Faire 78

__________________________________________________________________ But what was this new political science about ? According to Goldhammer ( 2006 ; 159 ) the new political science was about shaping man ’ s instincts in order to direct the new political art , because “ when the light of reason fails and the circumstances are unprecedented , instinct is all that man possesses to set himself on the right course .” 12 What Tocqueville did was to study psychological universals that could be used to delineate precise explanatory mechanisms in a variety of historical situations . 13 For Elster , Tocqueville ’ s psychological universals are not a matter of immutable desires and beliefs present at all times and places . Rather they consist of permanent possibilities , of mechanisms that can be activated anytime or anywhere by triggers that are much less understood than those mechanisms themselves . 14 Among these universal mechanisms , perhaps the most important one is Tocqueville ’ s Paradox . Elster understands this paradox as a psychological condition in which subjective discontent and objective ground for discontent may be inversely related to each other . 15 However , there are two versions of this paradox : the diachronic and the synchronic . In the diachronic version increased welfare in a realm of life , for example increased equality , may generate two effects : 1 ) a perception that inequality in that dimension is more and more intolerable ; 16 or 2 ) 12 Ibid ., pp . 152-58 . 13 Elster , Political Psychology , p . 140 . 14 Ibid . 15 Elster , “ Tocqueville on 1789 ,” p . 58 . a perception that inequality in another dimension is more and more intolerable . 17 The synchronic version states that the less increase in welfare a community has , and the more oppression is maintained , the less the system appears to be burdensome or unfair . Notably by addressing the psychological mechanisms of preconditions , paradoxes and triggers , Elster explained them in their particularity and only as related to particular accounts in Tocqueville ’ s work . But he was unable to create a systematic understanding of these mechanisms , or their interaction with institutional changes or institutional stability , for example in America or France . Elster ’ s analyses missed the “ conductive wire ” of Tocqueville ’ s psychological historical description of France and America . It failed to explain Guizot ’ s idea of “ moral laws ,” embedded in Tocqueville ’ s methodology , which connect the different events of history with one another , and with those at lower levels . II . Political Institutions and the French Revolution . In the introduction to The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution , Tocqueville justifies his book as an experiment to discover and understand the underlying causes of the French Revolution . To do so Tocqueville develops a multilevel explanation of the revolution : 1 ) an institutional level , which explains the evolution and influence of the French political and economic institutions over the beliefs and emotions of the French people ; and 2 ) a psychological level , in which beliefs and emotions explain the revolutionary behavior of the French commoners . This sec- 16 17 Ibid ., p . 60 . Ibid . __________________________________________________________________ Laissez-Faire 79