2024/05/31 by Richard Boyd, Gianna Englert · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #European Political History Analysis #Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis #Political Theory and Influence
paper · doi:10.53765/20512988.45.2.347
openalex publication_date 2024/05/31 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/11
Alexis de Tocqueville’s intellectual legacy has been characterized in terms of an arc: instant celebrity upon the publication of Democracy in America followed by waning influence after his death and belated rediscovery in the latter half of the twentieth century. Yet this article argues that Tocqueville’s ideas remained influential in the fin-de-siècle writings of the syndicalist Georges Sorel. It explores the curious matter of how a liberal famed for his commitment to a juste milieu in French politics could have played a significant role in the thinking of a radical defender of proletarian violence. Beyond the ideological curiosity of their interconnection, it demonstrates that the lessons Sorel derives from Tocqueville effectively transform a conservative argument about the futility of political revolutions into a call for structural upheaval. Sorel’s attention to these and other elements of Tocqueville’s political theory, we conclude, complicates further the ‘strange’ nature of the latter’s liberalism.