A01=Kevin Butterfield
affiliations
america
Author_Kevin Butterfield
belonging
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
church
citizenship
clubs
collective action
community
conformity
constitutionalism
democracy
diversity
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
fairness
fraternities
government
history
homosocial
labor unions
law
legalism
membership
nonfiction
organizations
personal autonomy
politics
private business corporations
reform societies
relationships
revolutionary war
shareholders
social life
voluntarism
voluntary associations
Product details
- ISBN 9780226297088
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 19 Nov 2015
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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.
Kevin Butterfield is assistant professor of classics and letters at the University of Oklahoma, where he is also senior associate director of the Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage.
