In a lecture that Tocqueville gave on April 3, 1852, at the public annual meeting of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques on the subject of political sciences (OC XVI, 229–242), he adopts a somewhat Hegelian basic perspective, which then also influenced his late work on the Ancien Régime. Here as there, it is said that political scientists, as “literati”, establish general and abstract ideas, rules, and laws, “from which then the specific social circumstances arise under which the politicians act, as well as the laws they believe they are inventing” (OC XVI, 233). Only the degree of abstraction needs to be nuanced, which distinguishes the timeless designs of Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Montesquieu or Rousseau from more concrete contributions to international law (Grotius or Pufendorf) or the treatment of individual questions (such as criminal law with Cesare Beccaria or the wealth of nations with Adam Smith) (OC XVI, 232). In his late work on the Ancien Régime, Tocqueville confirms this view by attributing to the political writers here, with their abstract theories, the (historically, however, superfluous) event of the French Revolution, shaped and somewhat brought about (see Sect. 4.3).