Toward the history of L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution.

Newness is the realm of the historian who, unlike the natural scientist concerned with ever-recurring happenings, deals with events which always occur only once. This newness can be manipulated if the historian insists on causality and pretends to be able to explain events by a chain of causes which eventually led up to it. He then, indeed, poses as the “prophet turned backward” … Causality, however, is an altogether alien and falsifying category in the historical sciences. Not only does the actual meaning of every event always transcend any number of past “causes” which we may assign to it …; this past itself comes into being only with the event itself. What the illuminating event reveals is a beginning in the past which had hitherto been hidden; to the eye of the historian, the illuminating event cannot but appear as an end of this newly discovered beginning. The path from the Souvenirs to L'Ancien Régime As Tocqueville composed his Souvenirs, he also thought of writing a new book. Musing in his solitude over the final shape of his recollections, he was led to renewed brooding over his own life's purposes. After ten years in the public arena, his regret, especially after the establishment of a presidential republic that claimed legitimacy in democratic forms, was tempered by some satisfaction of having gained an intimate knowledge of the actions of men in political life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]