19
and had come to regard both as episodes in a single ongoing Revolution. He writes to
Kergolay (December 15, 1850):
The more I think about it, the more I believe that this period would be a very apt
choice. In itself, it is not only great, but singular, even unique . . . What is more,
it sheds a bright light on the period that preceded it and on the one that follows
(OC XIII, 2, 231; cited by Jardin 1998, 485).
Tocqueville was less interested in historical narration and more intent on influencing
events by offering his contemporaries (as well as himself) a deeper understanding of the
new order within which they now found themselves. He continues,
my main order of business would not be to narrate . . . ; my aim, above all, would
be to explain the salient events, showing the diverse causes that produced them
and the consequences that emerged from them (ibid.).
Wolin insightfully remarks that Tocqueville’s reflections proceed “not by reduction . . .
but by enlargement.” He explains that Tocqueville characteristically meditates on “the
long-run consequence of a past event or action such that it reappears as a decisive
element in a present” (Wolin 2001, 510-511). Tocqueville’s turn to political history was
motivated by an effort to understand the meaning of contemporary politics—typically a
confusing and open-ended world whose deepest tendencies are hidden to those most fully
immersed in them. Tocqueville’s final literary masterpiece is at the same time an
intensely political act; it is an act of civic education calculated to awaken citizens to their
present servitude and rekindle in them an awareness of the primacy of politics. Unlike
the philosophes who came to the forefront of politics in the 18
th
century, Tocqueville
never lost touch with the idiosyncratic particulars of French political life. Although
Convention