Book: Swedberg, Richard, 2009: Tocqueville’s Political Economy. Princeton University Press.
Reviewer: Nicolas Jabko, Centre d’ Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, Sciences Po, nicolas.jabko@gmail.com
An abundant scholarship has established Alexis de Tocqueville as a major figure in the canon of political theory, but not as an economic thinker. Tocqueville’s Political Economy argues that that this is an unfortunate oversight, making the case for Tocqueville as an original and highly sophisticated analyst of economic phenomena. What Swedberg finds most interesting is Tocqueville’s “way of thinking” about the economy, especially the importance he grants to “ideas and moral feelings” in economic life. Written in the form of an intellectual biography, Swedberg’s book highlights the development of Tocqueville’s economic thought in his eventful life and his writings, offering the perspective of a leading economic sociologist on the relevance of Tocqueville today.
Swedberg thinks the value of Tocqueville’s perspective on political economy has gone largely unnoticed because his work is so difficult to fit within the established tradition of political economy. Unlike some of his contemporaries – and today’s economists – Tocqueville was not particularly interested in the economy for its own sake. Instead, he wanted to understand how economic phenomena interacted more broadly with social and political phenomena. Swedberg’s book therefore explicates Tocqueville’s way of thinking and his main insights from this perspective of “political economy” writ large.
Tocqueville viewed political economy primarily through the prism of his theory of the transition from “aristocracy” to “democracy.” Aristocratic societies organized along feudal lines and around agrarian economies were fast disappearing, replaced by democratic societies driven by egalitarianism, industry, and commercialism. Yet Tocqueville believed that even the most materialistic and democratic economy – the United States – could exist only within a cultural context of shared “mores.” Swedberg shows how the author of Democracy in America became fascinated with ntrepreneurship and sensed its importance for the future emergence of America as a global powerhouse. Looking for the causes of the United States’ economic success, Tocqueville focused on Americans’ cultural acceptance of risk-taking, and also on the importance of associations and contractual relations in American society. Swedberg points out that Tocqueville’s “embryo of a theory of entrepreneurship” differs from Schumpeter’s notion of entrepreneurship as a behavioral attribute of successful individuals in advanced capitalist societies. It may be added that Tocqueville’s view of American prosperity as fueled by entrepreneurial risk-taking also differs from Max Weber’s insistence on the cold rational ethos of modern capitalism.
Economic Sociology pp. 45-46 for more