Ralph Lerner, Revolutions Revisisted: Two Faces of the Politics of Enlightenment. (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994)

Excerpt:

The more impressive a work of historical analysis, the greater the likelihood it will deceive.  Whether a popular article or a scholarly monograph, its aura of completeness and balance, even its physical unity, may serve to conceal the field of diverse forces at whose intersections the historian stands.  Like the coroner’s report or the chemist’s analysis, the historian’s handiwork is a function of the interplay of investigating mind and subject matter.  Beyond that, however, it also involves the reciprocal shaping of author and audience; for as with a playwright or a politician, the historian’s effort to persuade or to alter conventional outlooks is limited by what the audience will bear.  Last, and usually least visible to readers of histories, are author’s efforts to maintain some critical distance from their contemporaries.  The attempt to see some earlier age for what it was obliges an author first to see the current age for what it is.  For to the extent that the historian’s stance towards peoples of the past rests upon the unexamined premises of the present, his work is apt to mistake present prejudices for past certainties.  Wishing simultaneously to locate himself in a time while rising above it, the historian repeatedly soars and sinks, until at last, like an erratic kite, he settles to the ground—his own ground.

This bracing tension between inquirer and milieu is almost palpable in Alexis de Tocqueville’s two great works, Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution.  In each, Tocqueville seeks not so much to see differently than his contemporaries as to see farther and higher.  In each, he has to contend with well-entrenched opinions whose practical effects he judges to be exacerbating the dangers and sickness of his age.  And in each, he seeks a means of prodding the complacent to take heed and of helping the fearful to take heart.

Online:
Amazon
Google Books (Preview)