The Making of Tocqueville s America

Release on 2015-11-19 | by Kevin Butterfield

Alexis de tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper and row, 1966), bk. 2, chap. 5, “ of the use that Americans Make of Association in civil Life,” p. 516. “Philanthropy of the Present Age,” New England ...

Author: Kevin Butterfield
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226297118
Category: History
Page: 336
View: 893

Alexis de Tocqueville was among the first to draw attention to Americans’ propensity to form voluntary associations—and to join them with a fervor and frequency unmatched anywhere in the world. For nearly two centuries, we have sought to understand how and why early nineteenth-century Americans were, in Tocqueville’s words, “forever forming associations.” In The Making of Tocqueville’s America, Kevin Butterfield argues that to understand this, we need to first ask: what did membership really mean to the growing number of affiliated Americans? Butterfield explains that the first generations of American citizens found in the concept of membership—in churches, fraternities, reform societies, labor unions, and private business corporations—a mechanism to balance the tension between collective action and personal autonomy, something they accomplished by emphasizing law and procedural fairness. As this post-Revolutionary procedural culture developed, so too did the legal substructure of American civil society. Tocqueville, then, was wrong to see associations as the training ground for democracy, where people learned to honor one another’s voices and perspectives. Rather, they were the training ground for something no less valuable to the success of the American democratic experiment: increasingly formal and legalistic relations among people.

Language: en
Pages: 626

Majority Tyranny in Tocqueville's America

Authors: John Stanley

Categories: African Americans

Type: BOOK - Published: 1966 - Publisher:

Books about Majority Tyranny in Tocqueville's America

Language: en
Pages: 311

The Making of Tocqueville's America

Authors: Kevin Butterfield

Categories: History

Type: BOOK - Published: 2015-11-19 - Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Alexis de Tocqueville famously said that Americans were "forever forming associations" and saw in this evidence of a new democratic sociability--though that seemed to be at odds with the distinctively American drive for individuality. Yet Kevin Butterfield sees these phenomena as tightly related: in joining groups, early Americans recognized not

Language: en
Pages: 340

America After Tocqueville

Authors: Harvey Mitchell

Categories: History

Type: BOOK - Published: 2006-11-02 - Publisher: Cambridge University Press

America after Tocqueville complements Harvey Mitchell's previous book, Individual Choice and the Structures of History: Alexis de Tocqueville as Historian Reappraised (1996). This study draws on Democracy in America to study the condition of democracy in the United States in our own time. Three aspects of Americanism inform Harvey Mitchell's