ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the importance of the independent sector and provides the best analysis of its function written by Alexis de Tocqueville, the young French aristocrat who came to young nation in the 1830s. People now talk only of the public and the private sectors. The Tocqueville saw the American impulse to act independently on the public business as the most remarkable trait. So Tocqueville, the most acute observer of the past, saw three sectors in America, namely: a then primitive commercial sector, a carefully limited government sector, and, most important, a unique and vigorous independent sector. But to describe America as a democracy implies that voting represents a citizen's total responsibility. The citizen's participation in public life, taken in its broadest terms, is lower in America than generally in countries that are similar to it in basic values.
