The making of Tocqueville's America : law and association in the early United States / Kevin Butterfield.

9780226297118 (ebook) :

Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

1 online resource : illustrations (black and white).

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Considering the question of why early 19th-century Americans were, in Alexis de Tocqueville's words, 'forever forming associations', Kevin Butterfield argues we need to first ask: what did membership really mean to the growing number of affiliated Americans? He argues that the first generations of American citizens found in the concept a mechanism to balance the tension between collective action and personal autonomy, something they accomplished by emphasising law and procedural fairness, and that as this procedural culture developed, so too did the legal substructure of American civil society. Thus, rather than being the training ground for democracy, where people learned to honour other voices and perspectives, associations were the training ground for something no less valuable to the success of the American democratic experiment: increasingly formal and legalistic relations among people.

Print version :

Books / Online

English

August 10, 2016

Includes bibliographical references and index.