ABSTRACT
When in 1831 a French count took upon himself the burden of crossing the Atlantic to inquire into the inner workings of the strange new society that was taking shape on the North American continent, he stumbled across a vast universe of voluntary associations.1 ‘I confess I had no previous notion’, he admitted to his readers, that Americans ‘of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations … of a thousand … kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive’. Indeed, he asserted, in ‘no country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used or applied to a greater multitude of objects than in America’.2 While the objects of such associations might often be trivial, he said, the results of this busy organizing was highly significant, since it formed nothing less than the foundation of ‘the most democratic country on the face of the earth’.3 A vibrant civil society begot modern democracy. For this reason, the count concluded, ‘[n]othing in my opinion is more deserving of our attention than the intellectual and moral associations of America’.4
