Alexis de Tocqueville e la Rivoluzione francese. Le idee e la realtà sociale

There is a fundamental antinomy in Tocqueville's thought: democracy versus revolution. Because, democracy and revolution, are the basis of two different political destinies followed by America and France. We are faced with the essential core of a perspective, which, on the one hand, looks at the social foundations of American democracy, the first to have given itself free institutions; while, on the other, he points out that in France a revolutionary crisis was regularly followed by a despotic regime. Democracy and revolution in Tocquevillian thought are totally linked because of the presence, both in the one and in the other, of some decisive elements: the historiographic methodology, the comparison between the philosophical method of the French so different from that of the Americans, the social reality, that is the state of France before 1789. It is on these aspects that Tocqueville decides the authentic meaning of the French Revolution.