In this book, he mines the plentiful repository of de Tocqueville's Democracy in America and Ancien Regime. The author finds, apart from limited instances of ‘elusive’, ‘muddled’, and ‘extravagant’ rhetoric, an amazing number of original and fine-grained causal mechanisms that Tocqueville pioneered to employ in his effort to explain social phenomena and change. Elster's method of ‘extracting’, ‘reconstructing’, and ‘decoding’ through sophisticated interrogation the French democratic aristocrat's writings brings to light a number of ‘exportable’ causal mechanisms. In the process, the book's provocative title becomes ever more plausible.’Ĭlaus Offe - Hertie School of Governance, Berlin They can enrich the toolbox of today's social scientists. ‘In this remarkable book, Jon Elster makes Tocqueville’s conceptual system a critical part of a large intellectual project.
Dubbing Tocqueville the ‘first’ social scientist, Elster focuses on how he thought rather than on what he found. We can profitably use Elster’s Tocqueville for making sense of our own social state.’ He brilliantly explains Tocqueville’s seemingly contradictory formulations and ambiguities of language as iterations in search of causal linkages. 'There is much ingenuity in the arguments put forward here and a refreshing newness of approach … The fresh air of new scholarship and new approaches can only invigorate.First record of the tadpole shrimp Triops cancriformis (Lamarck,1801) (Crustacea: Branchiopoda: Notostraca) in Por-tugal Notostracan crustaceans identified as Triops cancriformis according to the presently accepted morphological criteria were recorded for the first time in Portugal in 2007. All previous records of Triops in Portugal belong to mauritanicus lineage species i.e. cancriformis (Carvalho, 1944) has been re-identified by Machado in 2014 as T. baeticus after morphological examination. During 2007, hundreds of individuals of T. cancriformis were observed throughout the rice paddies on the northern margin of Sorraia River (Vale do Sorraia, Coruche). In the last 9 years, monthly checks during the rainy season have failed to record high population abundances and only a few specimens have been observed in the flooded tracks left by trucks and other heavy machinery on the elevated margins of the paddies.
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