3 - Tocqueville’s New Political Science

Summary

“A new political science is needed for a world altogether new.”’

(DAI Intro., 7)

Here is a striking statement, given a paragraph to itself, from the Introduction to Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Although it could hardly be more prominent, as an implied promise it is disappointing because Tocqueville never delivers the new political science. More cautiously, one could say that he never directly tells his readers what that political science is, what is wrong with the existing political science, and why political science is needed. Nonetheless, there is good reason to think that the new political science is in that book, and elsewhere in Tocqueville's writings, and that he left it implicit and scattered rather than explain it systematically, also for good reason.

To begin with the question why political science is needed, one might compare Tocqueville with two benchmarks, Aristotle and The Federalist. Aristotle is pre-modern; The Federalist is modern and American. In all three, political science is needed not only to describe politics but also to have a good effect on it. Contrary to the value-free ''empirical'' political science of our time, the task of their political science is to bring reform in the act of describing. For Aristotle, political science is a practical science.