In that small list of classics that make up the canonical books of comparative political analysis, Montesquieu and Tocqueville both merit more than one entry.l When this subject's history is written, any account, if it is to be adequate, will have to include Montesquieu's Persian Letters, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness and Decline of the Romans, and The Spirit of the Laws and Tocqueville's Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution. Every one of these works was deliberately comparative in conception and execution and still repays close scrutiny, not least on those points at which its author can be demonstrated to have been in error. Their subject was nothing less than the nature and types of human society as they affect politics; they are prime examples of a comparative political sociology that refuses to consider government apart from society or to reduce politics to a derivative function of social or economic process. Many of their analyses remain touchstones for anyone approaching such subjects. Yet a penumbra of tedium has come to surround certain topics, which all too regularly are introduced by the same limited stock of citations from these authors. Montesquieu and Tocqueville can scarcely be held responsible for the use of their work without reference to the processes by which their conclusions were attained and to their theoretical concerns, many of which we are only now beginning to identify. The fact is that the dubious homage of selective quotation has obscured a deep-rooted tradition of inquiry that has produced some of the greatest achievements of the social sciences.