ABSTRACT
My point of departure will be the journey of the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the major modern historians, and possibly (according to Elster 2009) the first social scientist, to the United States of America in 1831. In his work Democracy in America, Tocqueville was the first to analyze the township as the fundamental unit of the bottom-up social fabric of the states. The new system (which Tocqueville admired and at the same time was surprised by) was entirely based on the distribution of power in a myriad of groups, factions, towns and cities. It was the Founding Fathers’ legacy to avoid any power concentration and leave individuals free to pursue their own self-interest, which will eventually entail participating in the public sphere, and so on and up, to the level of state-building. This key feature of the American system – political fragmentation – is functional to the efficiency and performance of democracy. A century later, another European social scientist visiting the United States, the German sociologist Werner Sombart, observed that in American cities, trace of community was cancelled and pure organic society was demolished. A mere rationality was employed in the design of the urban fabric: the urban grid divided the whole country into squares which were always the same.
