explain why it occurs, under what conditions it might persist, and how the
forces it generates could alter it and set off new, unanticipated, processes.
In that sense, although they are unashamedly anachronistic (and not espe-
cially illuminating in terms of the history of ideas), the efforts of Jon Elster and
his collaborators to cast Tocqueville as a practitioner,avant la lettre, of Merto-
nian middle-range social theory serve a useful purpose (Elster 2007, 2009;
Hedström and Swedberg 1998). By demonstrating that many of Tocqueville’s
explanations can be framed in terms of‘social mechanisms’that link prefer-
ences, beliefs, choices, and outcomes, they highlight those explanations’
enduring explanatory power—a power evident in the ubiquity in contempor-
ary social science of‘Tocqueville effects’and‘Tocqueville hypotheses’.^4 And
that power gives Tocqueville’s analysis a depth Hancock does not achieve.
To say that is not to imply thatAustraliadoes not provide behavioural
explanations; it does, but they are often brittle. It may be, for example, that,
as Hancock suggests, the settlers, struggling with an environment that was far
removed from their experience and punishingly harsh, looked to government;
but why did that remain the case once a largely urban population had
achieved very high incomes? As for Hancock’s generalizations, such as the
description of Australians as political romantics, they frequently ring true, but
they are characterizations, not explanations.
There is, in other words, a difference of method and even of stance.
Tocqueville, unlike his good friend, J. S. Mill, saw little value in grand theoret-
ical systems, such as Comte’s positivism, that sought to transform the study of
society into a‘science’; but he did believe it was crucial to illuminate the
mechanisms (or what would now be referred to as the‘feedback loops’) that
connect actions and intentions, on the one hand, and social outcomes on the
other. Moreover, he sought to discern in what he saw not merely human
conduct but also the working out of forces that were‘providential’—with
the term connoting both the possibility of a higher power and of a force
that was irresistible.
In contrast, as Hancock later told Neville Meaney,‘conceptual frameworks
bore me’. Even with respect toAustraliaitself, he said,‘it was people of which
my friends were types and places which interested me’, much more than any
abstract generalizations. Despite the palpable influence on his thought of
Croce and Collingwood, Hancock’s ‘historical style’, Meaney concluded,
‘was that of a conversationalist’, with a focus, which became increasingly
marked over the years, not on‘abstract and generalised structures but [on]
(^4) Examples of propositions attributed to Tocqueville and frequently tested in the social science
literature include the claims that revolutions are more likely when incomes are rising, rather than
falling, as prosperity breeds ever rising expectations; that the transition to democracy is more
fraught with risks than democracy itself; and that the autocratic regimes that face the greatest risks
are not those that are most repressive but those whose repression is half-hearted.
Tocqueville, Hancock, and the Sense of History