More than a single footnote: Connecting Alexis de Tocqueville and Norbert Elias

Abstract

The view of Norbert Elias as a maverick sociologist who developed his ideas in isolation from other academic thinkers and schools has been debunked since the 1970s. A number of studies have linked Elias’s work to scholars such as Marx, Weber, Freud, Huizinga, and Mannheim, amongst others. In this paper, I contribute to these efforts by exploring affinities between Elias and Alexis de Tocqueville. Elias made only passing reference to Tocqueville in his published work, and Tocqueville has, until now, also been absent in the growing literature that situates Elias within the sociological canon. This is surprising, considering that affinities between the works of the two sociologists can be discerned beyond the single footnote that Elias reserved for Tocqueville. To discover and discuss these affinities, I compare Tocqueville’s observations on how ‘mores become milder as conditions become equal’ and Elias’s argument on ‘functional democratisation’, as well as their explanation and interpretation of the French Revolution. The comparison reveals that, in addition to a thematic affinity, Tocqueville and Elias also share a style of theorising and methodology that neither of them makes very explicit but that is distinct from more well-known traditions of sociological research.