I. The Return of Civil Society

Most contemporary democratic theorists agree that an orderly and viable democracy ultimately depends on the existence of a vibrant associational life consisting of a multiplicity of social networks, associations, and groups. Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine the daily functioning of modern democratic societies without the existence of civil associations such as charitable foundations, trade unions, churches, business groups, and other voluntary associations. All of these are credited with enhancing the quality of democracy by cultivating citizenship and promoting open fora for public deliberation and self-government.

A case in point is offered by the former communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, where the demise of communism has demonstrated the key role that civil society and its associations play in restoring political freedom and individual rights. Many Central and Eastern European intellectuals have courageously fought for the reconstruction of civil society and have maintained that only the restoration of an independent space between the state and individuals can guarantee the successful transition to an open society.Footnote ² In Poland, for example, the Solidarity movement challenged the legitimacy of the official regime by forcing the Communist Party to recognize the existence and the right of an independent political entity with no ties to the official hierarchy. In an essay written in 1982, the prominent writer and dissident Adam Michnik described the strategy followed by the nascent Polish civil society as follows: “These groups promoted social self-help and self-defense, organized independent intellectual activities, and worked outside censorship to fashion programs for the fight for freedom. The essence of the programs put forward by the opposition groups … lay in the attempt to reconstruct society, to restore social bonds outside official institutions.”Footnote ³ Along with the courageous political program of the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia,Footnote ⁴ the “politics of anti-politics” and the theory of the “parallel polis”Footnote ⁵ proposed by Vaclav Havel and Vaclav Benda in the late 1970s articulated an original view of civil society as the realm of the “power of the powerless.” This conception of civil society embraced an original strategy of individual liberation based on the imperative of “living in truth.”Footnote ⁶ The significance of the Polish Solidarity movement and the theory of anti-politics as strategies for the self-defense of society soon became powerful symbols for the fight against oppressive regimes throughout Eastern Europe. The example of Havel, Michnik, Andrei Sakharov, Lech Walesa, and their colleagues not only encouraged various dissident groups in Eastern Europe to express openly their own social and political agendas; it also reminded the friends of freedom in the West of the importance of civil society as a locus of resistance and freedom.Footnote ⁷

If everyone agrees today that the existence of a vibrant civil society is an essential prerequisite of democracy, this broad consensus on the virtues of civil society should not make us forget that only a century and a half ago, in On the Jewish Question (1843), Karl Marx gave voice to an alternative view of civil society as a realm of egoism, greed, and narrow self-interest that arguably thwarts democracy and increases the mutual antagonism between classes. The recent revival of interest in voluntary associations and civil society is a testament to this significant paradigm shift that has coincided with the demise of Marxism in the Western world. What is truly remarkable is the fact that the return of civil society has found advocates on both sides of the political spectrum. They have praised civil society and its intermediary institutions for being an indispensable buffer against undue state interference and have emphasized the seminal role of civil society as an effective means of building the “social capital”Footnote ⁸ essential for strengthening democratic values and citizenship.

The strong interest in the notion of social capital is worth pointing out in the context of recent debates on pluralism and civility. Writing from a Marxist perspective in the early 1980s, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu contrasted this concept with other forms of capital—cultural, economic, and symbolic. Social capital, Bourdieu wrote, is “the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition.”Footnote ⁹ More recently, in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000), Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam distinguished between bridging and bonding social capital. “Of all the dimensions along which forms of social capital vary,” Putnam wrote, “perhaps the most important is the distinction between bridging (or inclusive) and bonding (or exclusive). Some forms of social capital are, by choice or necessity, inward looking and tend to reinforce exclusive identities.”Footnote ¹⁰ As such, bridging social capital is more likely to have liberal effects than bonding capital, because the former encompasses not only a set of viable social networks but also a set of attitudes and mental dispositions that promote social cooperation and toleration.Footnote ¹¹

Beginning with Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1835, 1840), it has been customary to regard the United States as unusually “civic” in comparison to other countries. Its high degree of civicness has traditionally been attributed to the high density of networks of civic and social engagement.Footnote ¹² Nonetheless, a growing number of scholars, from Francis Fukuyama and Michael Sandel to Robert N. Bellah and Robert Putnam, have lately challenged the traditional optimism regarding the vibrancy of civil society in America and raised serious doubts about the long-term prospects for American democracy. The signs of civil decline and political apathy in the United States range from increasingly lower voter turnout to declining participation in town meetings, Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs), trade unions, and bowling leagues. Although religious groups, charitable institutions, and churches continue to retain significant influence in contemporary American society, the traditional communities which made up American civil society in the mid-twentieth century, from families and neighborhoods to workplaces, have been under constant assault.Footnote ¹³ In a 1995 essay, Putnam interpreted diminished civic engagement and lower social connectedness in the U.S. as the outcome of a host of social, cultural, and technological factors that radically altered American community life during the late twentieth century. “By almost every measure,” Putnam argued, “Americans' direct engagement in politics and government has fallen steadily and sharply over the last generation, despite the fact that average levels of education—the best individual-level predictor of political participation—have risen sharply throughout this period. Every year over the last decade or two, millions more have withdrawn from the affairs of their communities.”Footnote ¹⁴ Putnam maintained that the fast pace of economic growth and the major technological changes in the past few decades have had a complex impact on civil society broadly construed—leading, among other things, to a decline in civic engagement in America, depleted social capital, moral relativism, asocial individualism, increasing privatism, and civic apathy. Since civil society is “a realm that is neither individualist nor collectivist … [and] partakes of both the I and the we,”Footnote ¹⁵ these developments invite us to rethink the ethic of individualistic achievement and self-fulfillment and the unrivaled predominance of the language of individualism and individual rights in contemporary American society.

It is not a coincidence that, in the United States, the debate on civil associations has coincided with the revival of interest in the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, particularly Democracy in America, in which he famously praised the Americans' propensity to form civil and political associations. Tocqueville regarded these associations as laboratories of democracy that teach citizens the art of being free and give them the opportunity to pursue their own interests in concert with others. Indeed, the strong relationship between democracy and civil and political associations was one of the most important insights of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, which has become the locus classicus for any discussion of civil society. As Don Eberly, the editor of The Essential Civil Society Reader (2000), pointed out a few years ago, “in Tocqueville, we find an uncanny foretelling of the American cultural and social debate at the turn of the twenty-first century. Without a vibrant and functioning civil realm, he held that the state would emerge to fill the vacuum, producing … a gentle despotism.”Footnote ¹⁶ More so than any other political thinker, Tocqueville grasped the seminal role that civil and political associations play in the framework of modern society, and understood that in order to remain civilized, modern democratic regimes must constantly cultivate and promote the art and freedom of association.

II. The French Background

Tocqueville's views on political and civil associations cannot be properly understood unless we take into account the wider political background of his native France. After all, since Tocqueville went to America (from May 1831 to February 1832) in order to find lessons that might be applied to the French context, the portrait of American democracy that he offered to his countrymen had a strong normative component. In particular, Tocqueville's discussion of the right of association and the spirit of association in America was meant to convince his countrymen back home about the long-term benefits of civil and political associations, an idea that had traditionally been received with skepticism by the French, who were fascinated by the ideology of unity and general will proposed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's disciples during the French Revolution.

Drawing a famous distinction between the general will and the will of all in The Social Contract (1762),Footnote ¹⁷ Rousseau had argued that intermediary associations are not conducive to the pursuit of the common good because they tend to distort individual judgment. Doubting that individual differences could ever produce good decisions reflecting the general will, Rousseau feared that sectional associations would be formed at the expense of the larger association, and that prevailing opinions would be nothing more than private interests and private views. “If the general will is to be clearly expressed,” he wrote, “it is important that there should be no sectional societies in the state, and that each citizen should make up his own mind for himself.”Footnote ¹⁸ A few decades later, Rousseau's disciples, such as Abbé Sieyès,Footnote ¹⁹ took this argument a step further in emphasizing the indivisibility of the nation at the very moment when the representatives of the French nation attempted to replace the sovereignty of the monarch with their own sovereignty. “France,” Sieyès proclaimed in September 1789, “is and must be a single whole.”Footnote ²⁰ His position expressed the French fascination with the mystique of unity and the general will that elevated the general interest above particular interests. In adopting this antipluralist stance, the French Revolutionaries proved to be remarkably persistent in their attempts to eradicate the causes of factions rather than control their effects. In so doing, they implicitly rejected the Madisonian idea that “the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights.”Footnote ²¹

Yet the French political tradition was far from being monolithic in its skepticism toward intermediary associations, the kinds of associations suspected of corrupting or altering the general will and undermining the sovereignty of the nation. Tocqueville's description of the role played by civil and political pluralism in a democratic regime mirrored, to some extent, Montesquieu's arguments on intermediary bodies in a moderate monarchy.Footnote ²² To be sure, the connection between liberty, moderation, and pluralism loomed large in Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws (1748), as well as in his lesser-known (but equally important) book Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline (1734).Footnote ²³ Montesquieu distinguished between limited (constitutional) monarchy, tempered by pluralism and the rule of law, and rule by one man in the absence of the rule of law. He argued that if, in the state, there is only the momentary and capricious will of one person, nothing can be fixed and consequently there can be no fundamental law. Not surprisingly, Montesquieu preferred those political regimes that had an intricate structure consisting of overlapping centers of powers and interests. In his view, such pluralist regimes were more likely to preserve political freedom than any other regimes, because they had a complex system of checks and balances that placed effective limits on the exercise of power (by one person or a group of persons). At the same time, Montesquieu pointed out that only such systems create the conditions for genuine competition for social supremacy among various interests, principles, ideas, and groups that reflect the diversity of mores, manners, and customs of a nation and serve as effective breaks on arbitary power, intolerance, and fanaticism. “Intermediate, subordinate, and dependent powers,” Montesquieu wrote, “constitute the nature of monarchical government, that is, of the government in which one alone governs by fundamental laws.”Footnote ²⁴

Montesquieu singled out pluralism as one of the most important sources of political moderation and claimed that those regimes that do not encourage and promote social diversity and political pluralism cannot be called moderate. He went to great lengths to point out that intermediary bodies—nobles, clergy, “depositories” of laws, parlements, courts of justice, corporations—performed a seminal role in limiting the authority of the monarch, acting as countervailing powers capable of effectively restraining the potentially capricious will of the king. This explains why, in well-ordered monarchies, things were rarely carried to excess: the tendency of those regimes to excess was effectively moderated by the existence of powerful intermediary bodies. In such regimes, Montesquieu explained, “temperings are proposed, agreements are reached, corrections are made; the laws become vigorous again and make themselves heard.”Footnote ²⁵

In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu also emphasized the role of good laws and ordinances in moderating the power of the monarch, and added that they were supposed to act in concert with customs, traditions, and the multitude of offices and magistracies. As such, in Montesquieu's eyes, a moderate government appeared as a well-ordered and balanced system whose equilibrium resulted from a sound balance of powers and institutionalized interactions between various intermediary bodies and interests in society. If properly channeled into adequate institutions and laws, Montesquieu argued, the dissonances and divisions of this system would increase its internal capacity for self-correction rather than undermine its vitality (as Rousseau would claim a decade and a half later in The Social Contract).Footnote ²⁶

Alas, the French did not follow Montesquieu when they had a chance to implement a new political regime in the summer of 1789. Instead, they preferred Rousseau's theory of indivisible sovereignty and endorsed his celebration of unity and the general will. During the intense parliamentary debates of July and September 1789, Montesquieu's disciples and proponents of a constitutional monarchy (that mirrored the English model)Footnote ²⁷ failed to persuade their compatriots about the need for bicameralism and an absolute royal veto, and were defeated by the populist rhetoric of their opponents, such as Sieyès and Mirabeau.Footnote ²⁸ Rousseau's distrust of intermediary associations (factions) exercised a powerful influence on the revolutionary discourse on political associations and corporations, as demonstrated by the famous Chapelier Law of June 14, 1791. This law explicitly banned all kinds of corporations of citizens and emphatically declared that “citizens of the same occupation or profession, entrepreneurs, those who maintain open shop, workers, and journeymen of any craft whatsoever may not, when they are together, name either president, secretaries, or trustees, pass decrees or resolutions, or draft regulations concerning their alleged common interests.”Footnote ²⁹ The right of association was thus seen as inimical to the principles of liberty and the constitution; consequently, any corporations or groups that ignored the law were to be declared seditious assemblies and were to be punished accordingly. As Pierre Rosanvallon and Lucien Jaume have demonstrated, the mystique of unity and homogeneity that characterized the Jacobin discourse of democracy helps explain the peculiarities of the French political model and accounts for the presence of strong illiberal elements in modern French political culture, well beyond the horizon of the Revolution.Footnote ³⁰

The themes of intermediary powers and local associations never fully disappeared from the French post-revolutionary political vocabulary. During the Bourbon Restoration (1814–1830), both liberal and conservative writers praised the role of intermediary bodies as necessary countervailing powers in a constitutional monarchy. On the right, the brilliant polemicist Joseph Fievée argued: “We need powers between the general administration and the administered individuals; otherwise, neither liberty nor stability will ever exist in France.”Footnote ³¹ Prominent liberal thinkers such as Benjamin Constant also praised the virtues of intermediary powers as indispensable protective screens in modern society. In his Principles of Politics (1815), Constant commented at length on the seminal importance of municipal powers and local institutions. In order to attach individuals to their own places in society, Constant argued, “it is essential to grant them, in their homes, in their communes, as much political importance as possible without injuring the general good.”Footnote ³²

The twin issues of local associations and decentralization were present even on the agenda of the French Doctrinaires, who are often viewed as staunch partisans of centralization.Footnote ³³ In one of his parliamentary speeches from 1821, Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard explicitly linked the art of being free to the preservation of local independent institutions—“true republics in the bosom of monarchy”Footnote ³⁴ that had provided effective opposition to the power of the kings. Another Doctrinaire, Charles de Rémusat, stated: “The spirit of association marches forward with the spirit of liberty. England and America are its witnesses. Hence it is both advantageous and expedient to extend the empire of the spirit of association.”Footnote ³⁵ A similar point can be found in Prosper de Barante's important book Des communes et de l'aristocratie (1821). Under the Old Regime, local institutions developed into genuine “fragments of a constitution.”Footnote ³⁶ Although they were never fully established or recognized in legal terms, such institutions played an important role in bringing citizens together and allowing them to form common bonds. In the footsteps of Montesquieu, both Royer-Collard and Barante insisted that the Old Regime consisted of a surprisingly diverse society characterized by diverse customs, unwritten laws, and local associations—Barante refers to them as “communal societies”—all of which were destroyed under the centralized administration of Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642) and the rule of Louis XIV (1638–1715). The disappearance of these institutions was a momentous event that paved the way for the irresistible growth of absolute power and administrative centralization in France. The French Revolution completed the process of social leveling, destroyed intermediary bodies, and ended the tradition of local freedoms and local institutions that had previously served as effective countervailing forces to the power of the monarchs. The outcome of this process was the emergence of an atomized society, “la société en poussière,”Footnote ³⁷ and the destruction of local “communal societies” that were swallowed up in the centralized nation. As Barante remarked, the rule of the administrators began when the communes disappeared and were replaced by a new system in which the absolute will of the king prevailed.Footnote ³⁸

In spite of all this, it is revealing that only a few years before Tocqueville, another Frenchman who visited America, Victor Jacquemont (1801–1832), one of the most brilliant representatives of the new generation that came of age in the 1820s, made some interesting remarks (in correspondence with family members and friends) about the spirit of association in the New World—remarks that reveal some of the old French preconceptions concerning “uncivilized” American mores.Footnote ³⁹ Jacquemont was impressed by the multifarious ways in which American citizens made continuous and systematic use of the right of association to found schools and build churches and roads. He attributed the Americans' propensity to form civil and political associations to the principle of equality which reigns supreme in a democratic society. Jacquemont pointed out that Americans of all ages and professions displayed an unusual ability to choose common goals and were able to pursue these goals effectively by the aid of various civil associations. Americans, he noticed, shied away from carrying out these activities in isolation and viewed civil associations as powerful means of action that created sound social bonds.

At the same time, however, Jacquemont feared that the spirit of association might turn into a caricature when everyone acquired the habit of association and carried it to the extreme. He wryly noted that “ten Americans do not know how to dine, play or meet for any reason without electing a president and a secretary.”Footnote ⁴⁰ He added that all these American organizations resembled small armies in which there were no soldiers and in which everyone was a general. This, he opined, was the effect of equality and republican education on mores. While applauding the habit of forming associations for pursuing common projects, Jacquemont doubted that civil associations could ever serve as a substitute for what “civilized” Europeans called society in the proper sense of the word.Footnote ⁴¹ It was left to Tocqueville, who visited America four years after Jacquemont, to break with the French tradition of skepticism toward civil associations.

III. Tocqueville's Definition of Associations

In volume one of Democracy in America, Tocqueville defined an association as consisting “in the decision of a certain number of individuals to adhere publicly to certain doctrines, and to commit themselves to seek the triumph of those doctrines in a certain way” (DA, 216).Footnote ⁴² Associations bring together the efforts, ideas, and initiatives of many individuals and allow them to freely pursue common goals for the sake of the common good. “Men,” wrote Tocqueville, “can see one another, pool their resources, and exchange views with a forcefulness and warmth that the written word can never achieve” (DA, 216).

Tocqueville espoused a fairly broad view of associations and devoted a lot of attention to studying the relationship between civil associations, the right to associate, and the spirit of association in a democratic regime. It is worth pointing out that, in Tocqueville's view, the word “association” applied to local institutions and municipal councils as well as to newspapers, political parties, or party conventions that “would have never existed or flourished but for the initiative of individuals” (DA, 215). He distinguished three stages in the exercise of the right of association. The first stage channels individual actions toward some common goal. The second stage has to do with “the ability to assemble,” predicated upon the existence of centers of action and meeting places that allow people to interact with one another. The third stage refers to the tendency of people to form electoral bodies and choose delegates to represent them in a central assembly.

In his account of the American system of townships in Democracy in America, Tocqueville highlighted the seminal connection between municipal (local) institutions and political liberty. Local institutions, he remarked, constitute the strength of free nations and the key to their long-term survival: “It is at the local level that the strength of a free people lies. Local institutions are to liberty what elementary schools are to knowledge; they bring it within the reach of the people, allow them to savor its peaceful use, and accustom them to rely on it. Without local institutions, a nation may give itself a free government, but it will not have a free spirit” (DA, 68). On Tocqueville's view, local institutions also allowed people to exercise power immediately, gave them a stake in the administration of local affairs, and taught them the art of self-government:

It was to Tocqueville's credit that he grasped that in modern democratic societies local institutions are more necessary in proportion as the social conditions become more egalitarian and democratic, and as the sphere and scope of state intervention increase steadily.

IV. Civil Associations

Tocqueville's views on civil (and political) associations are articulated in several key chapters of Democracy in America. Footnote ⁴³ During his nine-month visit to America in 1831–32, Tocqueville had a unique opportunity to observe the beneficial effects of the science of association for which his compatriot, Victor Jacquemont, had only lukewarm words (mixed with a good dose of skepticism). Tocqueville was unambiguous in his praise of American associations. He understood the seminal connection between the process of equalization of conditions and the art of association, and this led him to point out that the more stable a democratic regime is, the more developed the art of association is in that regime. In his travel notes, Tocqueville wrote: “The spirit of association, as I have already remarked elsewhere, is one of the distinctive characteristics of America; it is by this means that a country where capital is scarce and where absolutely democratic laws and habits hinder the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few individuals, has already succeeded in carrying out undertakings and accomplishing things which the most opulent aristocracies would certainly have not been able to undertake and finish in the same way.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Tocqueville noted that in nineteenth-century America, civil and political associations served as laboratories of democracy while also providing indispensable social services to all citizens. “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all minds,” he remarked,

One of the main theses of Democracy in America is that a vibrant associational life cannot exist in the absence of a genuine and vigorous spirit of association. In America, Tocqueville argued, the existence of effective associations was made possible by the art of self-government and administrative decentralization. One of the most important consequences of self-government is “the ripening of individual strength which never fails to follow therefrom. Each man learns to think and to act for himself without counting on the support of any outside power which, however watchful it be, can never answer all the needs of man in society.”Footnote ⁴⁶ With one major exception (England), administrative decentralization and self-government hardly existed in the majority of European countries, where central power stifled local energies and restricted local autonomy. Tocqueville noted that, in this regard, America was fundamentally different from Europe; for, unlike the Europeans, American citizens learned early on in life to rely upon their own efforts in order to cope with practical challenges. Because they were taught to mistrust social authorities of all kinds, they developed a habit of cooperation and deliberation that permitted them to attend effectively to important common concerns such as public safety, commerce, industry, morality, and religion: “One encounters the same spirit in all aspects of social life…. There is nothing the human will despairs of achieving through the free action of the collective power of individuals” (DA, 215–16). More than any other country in the world, Tocqueville remarked, America had learned how to make the best use of the freedom to associate. In the New World, this freedom had not been used as a political weapon in the fight for power or against the government, but as an effective guarantee against the potentially despotic power of the majority.

The situation was radically different in the Old World, where most Europeans looked upon associations as weapons to be hastily used in political battles. When people did associate, Tocqueville pointed out, they did so as soldiers in an army in order to march against a common enemy: “The members of an association may regard legal resources as a useful means of action but never as the only path to success” (DA, 220). The main goal of these associations was not to debate and persuade others but to impose one's views upon them; as such, these associations required obedience or servility rather than reasoned argument and consent. Hence, the means that were chosen were not always peaceful and civil, but resembled most often the habits and rules of military life.

In America, far from triggering major political crises that might have thrown the country into anarchy, unlimited freedom of association had been instrumental in preventing social and political turmoil. This, Tocqueville noted, was a testament to the political experience of America, where the freedom to associate for political purposes was practically unlimited and universal suffrage successfully mitigated the potential violence of political associations. Because the members of civil and political associations knew that they never fully represented the majority, they developed respect for the rules of the political game and learned to compromise with their opponents. Tocqueville was quick to note the contrast with Europe, where most associations pretended to be the true representatives of the majority, and acted as if they were the “legislative and executive council of a nation” (DA, 222). This led them to believe that they were entitled to trample the laws under their feet when they thought it convenient to do so: “The members of such associations respond to orders as soldiers in the field…. Within such organizations a tyranny often prevails that is more unbearable still than the tyranny exerted over society by the government they attack” (DA, 222).

The salutary role played by civil associations in America, Tocqueville went on, went far beyond improving the daily lives of ordinary citizens. He claimed that in democratic times, the science of association had become “the fundamental science” (DA, 599), making possible progress in all the other sciences. The very survival of modern civilization ultimately depended on people developing the habit of forming associations in order to pursue common projects. For if men living in democratic countries failed to learn and practice the art of association, “civilization itself would be in peril” and society would risk relapsing into a new form of barbarism or despotism:Footnote ⁴⁷ “If men are to remain civilized, or to become so, they must develop and perfect the art of associating to the same degree that equality of conditions increases among them” (DA, 599). This, Tocqueville added, is far from being an easy task, since of all forms of liberty, freedom of association is the last one that people learn to master properly. It requires a long and difficult apprenticeship that is not without its own perils and challenges.

Much like Montesquieu's intermediary bodies in aristocratic times, in democratic regimes civil and political associations serve as effective and indispensable countervailing forces to concentrations of political power (state power, corporations, or the tyranny of the majority). Civil associations, Tocqueville believed, are particularly needed in democratic times when people are equal, independent, and individually weak, and when they tend to prefer equality over liberty and wholeheartedly embrace individualism as a way of life. If left unchecked, this passion for equality could develop into a real threat to liberty, while individualism, a peculiarly democratic phenomenon fueled by the passion for equality, tends to degenerate into pure egoism or selfishness.

V. Individualism and the Art of Association

Tocqueville's analysis of individualism as one of the central values of democratic societies is too well-known to require further elaboration. What is perhaps less well-known is the fact that this issue was far from being of mere theoretical interest to the French. It was the image of the atomized society—la société en poussière—that came to dominate the political debates in Restoration France (especially in the late 1810s and early 1820s), debates with which Tocqueville was entirely familiar by the time he visited America in 1831–32.Footnote ⁴⁸ The voices denouncing the perils of individualism spanned across the political spectrum in post-revolutionary France. “We cannot hide it from our eyes,” Jean-Baptiste Villèle remarked. “Our long civil troubles had given birth amongst us not to a new nation, but to a collection of individuals.”Footnote ⁴⁹ It was this process of atomization of society that became the focus of criticism, not only from conservative thinkers such as Villèle but also from figures on the left of the political spectrum, such as the philosopher Pierre Leroux and the disciples of the social theorist Henri de Saint-Simon.

The most significant expression of this atomized society was individualism, a word that was not invented by Tocqueville himself but had previously been used by Joseph de Maistre to criticize the allegedly pernicious effects of Protestantism in political life.Footnote ⁵⁰ In The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856), Tocqueville referred to a new type of individualism, which he dubbed “collective individualism,” that accounted, in his view, for the emergence of an atomized society on French soil: “Our ancestors lacked the word ‘individualism,’ which we have created for our own use, because in their era there were, in fact, no individuals who did not belong to a group and who could consider themselves absolutely alone; but each one of the thousand little groups of which French society was composed thought only of itself. This was, if one can use the word thus, a kind of collective individualism, which prepared people for the real individualism with which we are familiar.”Footnote ⁵¹

Tocqueville proposed a new understanding of individualism and insisted that the science of association could serve as an effective means of combating and neutralizing individualism's pernicious consequences, which had broken society into its bare elements.Footnote ⁵² It is important to note that Tocqueville distinguished individualism from mere egoism and selfishness. Unlike egoism, individualism is a novel democratic phenomenon that manifests itself as “a reflective and tranquil sentiment that disposes each citizen to cut himself off from the mass of his fellow men and withdraw into the circle of family and friends, so that, having created a little society for his own use, he gladly leaves the larger society” (DA, 585). The advance of individualism occurred against the background of an atomized society which, in turn, arose as old aristocratic institutions (institutions that had previously linked every man to his fellow citizens) gradually disappeared: “Aristocracy linked all citizens together in a long chain from peasant to king. Democracy breaks the chain and severs the links” (DA, 586). As the contemporary French political philosopher Pierre Manent has perceptively noted, democracy threatens to dissolve the social contract between individuals, throwing them back into a state of nature.Footnote ⁵³ “Not only does democracy cause each man to forget his forebears,” Tocqueville wrote, “but it makes it difficult for him to see his offspring and cuts him off from his contemporaries. Again and again it leads him back to himself” (DA, 587). As a result, individuals living in democratic times are separated from each other, owe nothing to anyone, and expect nothing from anyone: “They become accustomed to thinking of themselves in isolation and are pleased to think that their fate lies entirely in their own hands” (DA, 586–87).

How can this democratic phenomenon be properly combated? Does democracy naturally tend toward social anomie? And what remedies can be used to stave off a phenomenon that imprisons individuals in the solitude of their own hearts and souls, and ultimately fosters individual powerlessness and civic apathy? For all its concerned tone, Tocqueville's diagnosis of democratic individualism was not a pessimistic one. The science of association, he noted, is itself a powerful remedy against social anomie and isolation. The need for associations arises from the individual weakness of each person, a feature that is inherent in the nature of democratic society, in which people are no longer united by firm and lasting ties or by subordination to prominent aristocratic individuals. Only voluntary associations can work against the weakness of individuals and bring them together to act in concert. If individuals in democratic societies are disposed to live apart, they also have numerous opportunities to draw near to their fellow citizens and participate in common projects. Moreover, the art of association has an ennobling effect upon the minds and souls of individuals living in democratic societies. Feelings and ideas are renewed and the heart itself expands as the result of social interaction and exchanges; through them, people lend one another mutual assistance and combine their efforts and energies in the pursuit of common goals. Associations teach their members new ways of improving both the common property and their own lot. What's more, associations increase individuals' self-confidence and respect for others, impart new knowledge, and enlighten individuals while also cultivating their taste for even greater enterprises.

Tocqueville highlighted this advantage of democracy in a seminal passage from Democracy in America that deserves to be quoted in full:

Some of these miracles, Tocqueville argued, are performed by civil and political associations supported by local liberties. What makes these associations effective in America is the unique combination of local liberties, self-government, political rights, and decentralization. As I have already noted, associations reconstitute a new social contract between individuals whom equality had formerly placed side by side and had left without any common ties. By reminding them that they are not—and can never be—independent of their fellow men, civil and political associations tame their selfishness, purify their interest, and moderate their indifference toward anything that goes beyond their narrow sphere. By linking private and common interests, associations encourage democratic individuals to take an interest in their fellow citizens, and predispose them to seek their fellow citizens' cooperation.

From temperance societies and lobbying groups to professional organizations and church support groups, these associations, whether broad or narrow in scope, make people constantly feel the need for each other, bring them together, and force them to acquaint, help, and adapt themselves to one another. In doing so, associations allow individuals to see the connection between their private interests and the public affairs which they undertake in common. As Tocqueville observed:

VI. Political Associations

Although Tocqueville carefully distinguished between civil and political associations, he believed that, in the end, they all act as “vast free schools” (DA, 606) in which people learn the art of being free. As such, the relation between the two types of associations is both natural and necessary: “Civil associations facilitate political associations, but then again, political association singularly develops and perfects civil association” (DA, 604). Politics provides an arena in which large associations such as political parties make the practice of association more general and more widespread. Yet, at the same time, political associations, by drawing together a large number of individuals, may disturb social order if their energies are applied to subverting the constitutional foundations of society.

Tocqueville was concerned by the abuse of freedom of association, and, as we have already seen, he acknowledged that the proper exercise of this liberty requires a long experience and an advanced degree of civilization that teach people how to tolerate differences of opinion and how to practice self-restraint. Under certain circumstances, Tocqueville pointed out, a democratic nation may seek to confine the freedom of association within certain limits in order to protect itself against abuses of that freedom. When the differences between political associations are fundamental and irreconcilable, absolute freedom of association can jeopardize social order and disturb the regular functioning of representative government. In such cases, there is no peaceful contestation of power by opposition parties, but only an all-out war between them that makes any compromise impossible or extremely difficult. This, Tocqueville added, was not the case in the United States, where the differences of opinion were mere differences of hue rather than fundamental differences of political principles.

Tocqueville's endorsement of political parties in America should not make us forget that his views on political parties were anything but orthodox; in fact, the type of politics that he was longing for turned out to have little place for ordinary party politics and political bargaining. Tocqueville was and remained to the very end a highly independent mind, unable to give his full allegiance to any political party of his times. His reputation derived mostly from the formidable success of volume one of Democracy in America, but even that had to be taken with a grain of salt. As he acknowledged to his friend Eugène Stoffels in 1836, “I please many persons of conflicting opinions, not because they understand me, but because they find in my work, by considering it only from a single side, arguments favorable to their passion of the moment.”Footnote ⁵⁴

In other letters, Tocqueville called himself a “liberal of a new kind” who followed no group and had no party behind him. In a letter to his mentor, Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, composed in 1841, Tocqueville wrote, not without a peculiar mixture of pride and sadness: “The liberal but not revolutionary party, which alone suits me, does not exist.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Nine years later, he made the same point in a letter to Louis de Kergorlay, in which he described himself again as a man without party or cause “other than that of liberty and human dignity.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Not surprisingly, the conception of freedom that Tocqueville endorsed was a highly idiosyncratic one. When challenged to describe it, he proudly wrote: “Do not ask me to analyze this sublime desire, it must be felt. It enters of itself into the great hearts that God has prepared to receive it; it fills them, it fires them. One must give up on making this comprehensible to the mediocre souls who have never felt it.”Footnote ⁵⁷

As a deputy representing his constituency from Normandy,Footnote ⁵⁸ Tocqueville could ally himself neither with radical democrats, whose extreme zeal for equality he viewed with skepticism, nor with the nostalgic conservatives and prophets of the past, who failed to understand that a new science of politics and new concepts were needed for a new epoch. Not surprisingly, Tocqueville refused to associate himself in a permanent manner with any of the political men of his times, especially Adolphe Thiers and François Guizot,Footnote ⁵⁹ who were, to use his own words, “fundamentally antipathetical”Footnote ⁶⁰ to his independent way of feeling and thinking. Moreover, Tocqueville displayed the same uneasiness vis-à-vis the dominant parties and groups that divided France: “I do not see a single one to which I would want to be tied. I do not find in any of them, I do not say everything that I would want to see in political associates, but even the principal things for which I would willingly give up the lesser.”Footnote ⁶¹

Tocqueville's skepticism toward political parties during the July Monarchy (1830–1848) should not come as a surprise to any attentive reader of Democracy in America, who will remember that Tocqueville distinguished between two types of parties which he dubbed “minor” and “great” parties. The political parties that he called “great” were those that dedicated themselves “to principles [rather] than to their consequences; to generalities and not particulars; to ideas and not to men” (DA, 199). Such parties, Tocqueville argued, were distinguished by their noble features and pursuits, and their adherents were moved by genuine convictions and generous passions rather than purely by private interests and petty intrigues. Minor parties lacked true ideals and their members were often carried away by a factitious spirit and partisan zeal that corrupted their language and made their actions erratic and uncertain. “Great parties,” Tocqueville wrote, “stand society on its head; minor parties agitate it. Great parties tear society apart; minor parties corrupt it. The former may at times save society at the cost of disrupting it, while the latter provoke agitation without profit” (DA, 199). America, he went on, once had great parties at the moment of its founding, but they had disappeared over time, being replaced by smaller parties that lacked the loftiness of purpose of their predecessors.

France, too, seems to have followed the same declining pattern. It once had noble and generous passions, but their hour was long gone. In The Old Regime and the Revolution, Tocqueville described the actors involved in the initial phase of the revolution in the following glowing terms: “People had real convictions, everybody followed his own convictions boldly, passionately.”Footnote ⁶² The heroes of 1789, Tocqueville argued, were concerned with lofty and ambitious goals and were animated by sincere and generous emotions. Their youthful enthusiasm was combined with true independence of mind and passionate faith in themselves; they believed in a noble cause that convinced them to act boldly in order to correct the mistakes of the past. They were sincerely interested in public affairs, forgetful of their individual interests, and absorbed in the contemplation of a great plan aiming at the common good. “I have never met,” Tocqueville wrote in The Old Regime, “with a revolution where one could see at the start, in so many men, a more sincere patriotism, more disinterest, more true greatness…. This is 1789, a time of inexperience doubtless, but of generosity, of enthusiasm, of virility, and of greatness, a time of immortal memory.”Footnote ⁶³

Not surprisingly, the daily politics of the July Monarchy, a period of bourgeois individualism and acquisitiveness, failed to quench Tocqueville's thirst for noble actions. True politics, Tocqueville believed, could not exist in a world dominated by the bourgeoisie. “You know what a taste I have for great events,” he confessed to his mentor Royer-Collard, “and how tired I am of our little democratic and bourgeois pot of soup.”Footnote ⁶⁴ On numerous occasions, Tocqueville voiced his concern about the emergence of a prosaic society entirely dominated by the values and principles of the bourgeoisie. The reign of the middle class, Tocqueville wrote in his Recollections, was exclusive and corrupt; public morality was degraded, and a general flatness and mediocrity threatened to create a flaccid humanity, incapable of any great heroic actions.Footnote ⁶⁵ If a society could be compared to a garden, then France was entirely laid out to produce carrots and cabbages rather than peaches and oranges. Tocqueville, who had once compared himself to Don Quixote, dreamt of something far nobler than that.

VII. Conclusion: The Contemporary Relevance of Tocqueville

To what extent do Tocqueville's views on civil society, formulated almost two centuries ago, remain relevant for our times? For all his criticism of American restlessness, Tocqueville saw American society as fundamentally sound because it was capable of generating and educating virtuous citizens who knew how to combine self-interest with concern for the public good. If this was not a brilliant society, at least it was a decent one, or to put it differently, it was a society that developed a set of peaceful virtues suited to individuals living in democratic times.

Needless to say, some of us might be reluctant to endorse such an optimistic view today. A growing body of evidence shows a significant decline of family life, increasing civic apathy, and pervasive selfishness, made possible by a radical interpretation of individual rights.Footnote ⁶⁶ Moreover, associational life in early twenty-first-century America is quite different from that of the 1830s, when Tocqueville visited America. Long gone are the famous temperance societies that impressed the French visitor, who was struck by the fact that responsible adults pledged to use the force of association to resist one of the most intimate urges of each human being.Footnote ⁶⁷ While many contemporary civil associations foster character traits needed for the proper functioning of democratic regimes, such as independence of spirit, general tolerance for pluralism, and respect for diversity, membership in many associations today is mostly nominal, the payment of membership dues often being the only sign of participation in these associations.

Furthermore, there is a certain irony in Tocqueville's strong endorsement of civil and political associations and his critique of individualism, for Tocqueville himself often remained aloof from the political parties of his time and took great pride in stressing his independence from them. A proud and extremely ambitious person who was, however, haunted by a permanent lack of confidence in himself, Tocqueville devoted a great deal of time to cultivating deep friendships with a few friends, such as Gustave de Beaumont and Louis de Kergorlay, and enjoyed discharging the duties imposed by his aristocratic position on his Normandy estate. But when he stepped out of this intimate circle, Tocqueville often found it difficult to cooperate with other colleagues. As his biographer André Jardin remarked, “in his periods of euphoria, he allowed himself to be carried away by an enthusiasm that made him lose his sense of reality.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Two revealing examples of Tocqueville's curious combination of strong ambitions and political ineffectiveness are his involvement in the publishing of the newspaper Le Commerce, and his attempt to build a new political movement on the left in the mid-1840s.Footnote ⁶⁹ Tocqueville became involved in the publication of Le Commerce: Journal politique et littéraire in the summer of 1844 and hoped that the newspaper would soon become “the only authentic representation of liberal ideas” in France.Footnote ⁷⁰ In spite of Tocqueville's initial hopes, however, Le Commerce did not bear the expected fruit. Not only was he forced to withdraw from the editorial board a year later because of financial difficulties, but his short involvement in the publication of the newspaper led to a temporary rift with his best friend, Gustave de Beaumont.

The new political direction that Tocqueville dreamt of giving to the French left in the mid-1840s also failed, because it did not manage to articulate a viable political alternative to the political parties of that time. As I have already mentioned, Tocqueville's search for an alternative to the politics of the July Monarchy was motivated by his deep-seated distrust of a politics based exclusively on self-interest. He felt estranged from the values of the bourgeoisie, which he chastised for lacking both true virtue and greatness. In his Recollections, Tocqueville described the spirit of the bourgeoisie as “active and industrious, often dishonest, generally orderly, but sometimes rash, because of vanity and selfishness, timid by temperament, moderate in all things, except a taste for well-being, and mediocre.”Footnote ⁷¹ He felt alienated by the pervasive obsession with money, the increasing commercialization of life, and the general abasement of mind and taste brought about by the rise of the middle class.Footnote ⁷²

Yet, unlike Marx who rejected civil society (which in his view was nothing but the realm of greed and selfishness), Tocqueville correctly grasped that the long apprenticeship of liberty depends to a significant degree on the science of association that draws precisely on those bourgeois virtues—self-restraint, temperance, self-interest rightly understood—that Marx despised and rejected. Tocqueville acknowledged that civil associations perform many functions in democratic societies, from serving as centers of opposition to tyranny (of the state or of the majority) and neutralizing the effects of social anomie and civic apathy, to fostering necessary civil (bourgeois) virtues. As such, associations help transform unenlightened self-interest into self-interest rightly understood, help moderate and purify the excesses of individualism, and help promote civic solidarity by bringing people together and giving them the opportunity to act in concert. In doing so, civil and political associations help heal the fragmentation created by conditions in modern society and help generalize norms of reciprocity and informal norms of cooperation.

At the same time, it would be incorrect to assume that, in Tocqueville's view, civil and political associations served as a panacea for all the problems of democracy. To his credit, he was fully aware that they did not; in fact, both in Democracy in America and in his private correspondence, he insisted that mores are more important than laws, associations, and institutions in promoting and sustaining democracy over time. As he wrote to his friend Francisque de Corcelle in 1853, political societies are not what their laws and institutions make them, “but what sentiments, beliefs, ideas, habits of the heart, and the spirit of the men who form them, prepare them in advance to be, as well as what nature and education have made them.”Footnote ⁷³

Last but not least, civil and political associations are themselves subject to professionalization and the iron law of oligarchy. As the effects of pork-barrel politics also extend to political associations, many of them tend to become rigid and excessively bureaucratic, and fall prey to factional politics. In other words, paraphrasing Tocqueville, one might say that the mere fact of associating is often less important in practice than what is associated with it—which is another way of saying that not all forms of associations are likely to promote democracy and democratic values.Footnote ⁷⁴ As the contemporary political philosopher Richard Boyd has perceptively argued, “more is not always better,”Footnote ⁷⁵ and we should seek to go beyond counting associations when attempting to assess the vitality of civil society today. Civil society, Boyd writes, consists “rightly speaking, only of those associations that contribute to the virtues of civility,” associations that successfully promote social trust and civic solidarity. At the same time, there are many associations and groups which are not oriented to issues outside of themselves and, as such, tend to prove divisive and uncivil, fostering intolerance, exclusion, and generalized mistrust of outsiders and of government.Footnote ⁷⁶ These uncivil associations—some of which exclude and harass nonmembers and seek to promote racist ideologies or illegitimate hierarchies—may foster a strong sense of identity and community within their frameworks, but their legacy is a predominantly negative one because their activities deepen social, political, economic, cultural, and intergenerational divisions.

As Tocqueville reminds us, this is a small price to pay if we want to remain civilized and avoid relapsing into barbarism. Although we shall never be able to reach a consensus about the ends of politics, we might be able to agree on the means of civil politics. Without the virtue of civilityFootnote ⁷⁷ and the mediating structures that stand between the private sphere of individuals and the impersonal structures of today's world, there can be no genuine freedom in modern societies.