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- Title
Tocqueville and the Consciousness of Capital (Reading The Ancien RÉgime with LukÁcs).
- Authors
Dodman, Thomas
- Abstract
Since the 1970s, Alexis de Tocqueville's The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution has provided an intellectual linchpin for revisionist accounts of the French Revolution as a political event, divorced from socioeconomic logics. This article offers an alternative reading of this classic text. It argues that Tocqueville's analysis grapples at a fundamental level with social change and tries to grasp its manifestations in processes of bureaucratization and abstraction. Read alongside Georg Lukács' seminal analysis of modern rationalization as reification, it offers a suggestive take on capitalist transformation in eighteenth and nineteenth-century France. I suggest that in our current historiographical conjuncture, Tocqueville's analysis can serve as a point of departure to understanding how capitalism invests all spheres of life, both material and ideational.
- Subjects
CONSCIOUSNESS; FRENCH Revolution, 1789-1799; ANCIEN Regime &; the French Revolution, The (Book); TOCQUEVILLE, Alexis de, 1805-1859; CAPITALISM
- Publication
French History, 2020, Vol 34, Issue 3, p360
- ISSN
0269-1191
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/fh/craa047