In the Old Regime and the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville provides one of the most influential assessments of what causes revolutions. Departing from accounts of his contemporaries, which saw 1789 as a decisive rupture from the past—for good or evil—Tocqueville took a different approach. He argued that the underlying causes of the French Revolution had its roots in the Old Regime, whose obsession with reform, experiments with centralised government, and successes in making France more prosperous than its neighbours paradoxically made revolution more likely. In these sessions, we shall explore Tocqueville's understanding of revolution, and what lessons for our time can be drawn from his work.

This is the second of two seminars that Dr. Nathan Pinkoski (Toronto) will lead on this topic.