The title of this book places me in a minority position on two separate counts.

Most scholars of Tocqueville think he was a great political theorist, and pay little attention to him as a social scientist. They view his main concern as normative, not as explanatory. Although I intend to show that he was an important social scientist, it is of course harder to prove the negative statement that he was not a major political thinker. Indeed, I am not going to make a systematic argument to that effect. I may mention, as one indicator, that in the index to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice there are twenty references to John Stuart Mill, but not a single one to Tocqueville. A more direct refutation of any claim on his behalf to be a great political thinker is given by the hugely incoherent structure of the work on which any such claim would have to rest, Democracy in America. I believe the bulk of the present book will make it clear beyond doubt that in that work, at least, Tocqueville was not a systematic thinker. Although he asserts in the Introduction to the book that a new world needs “a new political science,” he does not provide it. His work on the ancien régime, while much more coherent and systematic, is a profound work of historical sociology but not of political theory. Yet, to repeat, my claim that he was not an important political theorist is strictly subsidiary to my positive argument.