ABSTRACT
I wrote a book, The Changing and Unchanging Face of U.S. Civil Society, that is based on two questions: (1) Did U.S. civil society change during the twentieth century? and (2) if so, how did it change?1 My research design was based on “thinking institutionally” about democratic civil society.2 Consequently, I began with a minimalist model of civil society in the United States and extracted what seemed to be the most important components of this institution, both from Tocqueville’s work and from pluralist democratic theory. The resulting five components were voluntary association, diversity of association, communication, autonomy, and mediation. I used this model to discipline a search for empirical data that applied and spoke to change across a lengthy period of time. I tried to be receptive to any kind of detectable change. The result is an empirical description of a particular democratic civil society, that of the United States.
