ABSTRACT
This chapter provides transition to the topic of "Voluntary Associations" by pointing out that the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy is itself one of those voluntary, or private, associations which "Americans of all ages, all conditions and all dispositions, constantly form." The Americans have no philosophical school of their own and they care but little for all the schools into which Europe is divided, the very names of which are scarcely known to them. It describes on the history of American philosophy— especially before 1850— it appears to me that there is probably more justice, and certainly more social insight, in the original judgment than in the correction. That American political thinkers and American students of politics generally have never yet "taken the trouble to define the rules of [the] philosophical method" which they possess in common. "At the time Tocqueville wrote, American interest in German Idealism was lively and Transcendentalism, a characteristically American form of Idealism, was widely accepted.".
