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.
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