Tocqueville: The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution

Jon Elster

jun 2011 · Cambridge University Press

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This translation of an undisputed classic aims to be both accurate and readable. Tocqueville's subtlety of style and profundity of thought offer a challenge to readers as well as to translators. As both a Tocqueville scholar and an award-winning translator, Arthur Goldhammer is uniquely qualified for the task. In his Introduction, Jon Elster draws on his recent work to lay out the structure of Tocqueville' argument. Readers will appreciate The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution for its sense of irony as well as tragedy, for its deep insights into political psychology and for its impassioned defense of liberty.

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Jon Elster has taught at the Université de Paris VIII, the University of Oslo, the University of Chicago, Columbia University and the Collège de France. He is the author of twenty-three books translated into seventeen languages, including Ulysses and the Sirens (1979), Sour Grapes (1983), Making Sense of Marx (1985), Alchemies of the Mind (1999), Explaining Social Behavior (2007), Le désintéressement (2009), Alexis de Tocqueville: The First Social Scientist (Cambridge, 2009) and L'Irrationalité (2010). Professor Elster is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Academia Europaea, and Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

Arthur Goldhammer has translated more than 100 works from French, including Tocqueville's Democracy in America. He is a three-time recipient of the French-American Foundation translation prize. France made him a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the Académie Française awarded him its Médaille de Vermeil.