Johann Neem's well-researched and gracefully written book is a valuable contribution to the field of American political thought, as well as broader debates within political science on the nature and purpose of civil society within democracy. Neem has provided the first extended study of the place of the corporation in the development of civil society in early-national Massachusetts (1780 to 1874, with a focus on the early decades of the nineteenth century). Through his case study, Neem shows us how important changes in corporate law and party politics contributed to the development of the right to freedom of association and a thriving civil society in early nineteenth-century Massachusetts and beyond.

Working in the field of early American history, Neem recognizes the value of tightly limiting the scope and theme of the study. Early-national Massachusetts is an ideal case for his study, given the emergence of its thriving civil society—filled with influential voluntary organizations such as the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society—from about 1810 onward. As an intellectual historian with a strong background in political theory, Neem uses this case-study approach to engage the literature on civil society and democracy in America, question some of its assumptions and conclusions, and make his own contributions to the theoretical debates. Although the book focuses on Massachusetts law and politics from 1780 to 1860, its arguments are framed against the background of landmark cases in American constitutional law (such as the 1819 Supreme Court decision on Dartmouth College vs. Woodward), classic studies in American political science (such as Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action, 1965), and a long-term historical view of the development of corporations as major political actors in America. Unfolding against this broad background of constitutional law, political theory, and contemporary politics, the book is both a good political history of early-national Massachusetts and a valuable text for political science.

Neem organizes the book chronologically and thematically. Chapter 1 analyzes how the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution gave the government broad control over civil society. Article six “prohibited the state from establishing, or even recognizing, any associations that did not serve what leaders took to be the common good” (p. 18). This article built on the long-standing Anglo-American fear that private associations and corporations, motivated by partial interests, were threats to the realization of the public good. Article three “authorized state support for religion,” continuing the old Puritan civic tradition of localities supporting public congregations through taxes. This article created a contested divide between private, self-created churches (such as the Baptists and Methodists) and the Congregationalist churches recognized as corporations by the state. The 1780 constitution also established a system of public schools, supported by taxes. Late-eighteenth-century Massachusetts thus supported a civil society that was highly regulated by government with the aim of protecting the public good.

Given the restriction of article six and the culture of suspicion concerning private associations and corporations, postrevolutionary Massachusetts supported only a few of them. Chapter 2 recounts the contested status of such groups in Massachusetts law and politics during the Federalist and Jeffersonian eras. Despite its support by George Washington, the Society of the Cincinnati—a private association of Revolutionary War officers and their eldest male heirs—was denied a corporate charter by Massachusetts in 1784 on the grounds that it was a “select Society” and as such threatened the “subversion of public liberty” (p. 42). In 1808, Massachusetts Federalist and Republican legislators were united in their distrust of voluntary associations and corporations. They rejected the “infidel bill,” which would have “granted self-created voluntary churches privileges usually reserved for incorporated ones” (p. 53).

The tide began to turn in favor of associations and corporations in 1810, with the explosive growth of voluntary, religious, and charitable organizations in Massachusetts civil society during the following few decades. In addition, there were several changes in Massachusetts and federal law that favored the development of corporations with less public regulation. A short-lived 1810 state legislative act enabled Harvard College to have a private, self-perpetuating board of overseers, effectively removing it from governmental control. Though repealed, it set a precedent for allowing greater autonomy for Harvard and other corporations in the Massachusetts public sphere. The U.S. Supreme Court's Dartmouth vs. Woodward decision in 1819, which effectively rendered Dartmouth College a private corporation without public officers, meant the death of the “Federalists' vision of a civil society managed by the state in the name of the people” (p. 74). From then on, in Massachusetts and elsewhere, “Corporations and their officers could now act as private persons” free from the obligation to serve the government's conception of the public good (p. 74).

Alongside these legal changes, the culture of Massachusetts civil society was transformed by the skyrocketing number of private, voluntary, charitable, and religious organizations that formed as a result of the Second Great Awakening. Chapter 4 explores how private societies devoted to temperance, sharing the Bible, caring for the female poor, and advocating against slavery began to dominate the civil landscape in Massachusetts. By using networking techniques, such as auxiliary systems and parent organizations, these initially small, local groups quickly grew in numbers, funding, and national influence. What Neem calls a “grassroots public sphere” emerged in Massachusetts and beyond. This grassroots public sphere had a dark side, however, as it stirred conflict between minority and majority groups. For example, tensions ran so high between elite Masons and the populist anti-Masonry movement that the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts was legally made to surrender its state charter as a public corporation in 1834.

Chapter 5 explores how the Whigs, who were the political heirs of the Federalists, negotiated the post-Dartmouth legal landscape to uphold private organizations and corporations as nonpartisan servants of the public good. By the 1860s, Harvard College, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Boston Athenaeum were recognized as nonprofit corporations established for the common good but ruled by elite, private boards of trustees. A major conceptual and legal shift had occurred: The “public” status of a corporation was determined by its charitable goals, not by direct government oversight.

The Jeffersonian-Democratic critique of this trend toward the privatization of corporations, as well as the related rise in civil associations, is the fascinating subject of Chapter 6. Following Thomas Jefferson and the Republicans, the Democrats suspected the corrosive effects of minority factions on popular sovereignty. In particular, the “Democrats' hostility to the corporation spirit was directly largely against elite Whig institutions and middle-class evangelical associations,” as well as labor unions (p. 159). The growing public contestation over the legitimacy of labor unions led to a pivotal Massachusetts Supreme Court decision, Commonwealth v. Hunt, in 1842. Commonwealth defended the Boston Journeymen Bootmakers' Society's right to form a labor union, and ultimately made the freedom of association a legal right of all citizens of the state. From 1842 onward, the “debate would now be over the actions of associations rather than their mere existence” (p. 163). The Democrats came to warily accept the institutionalization of powerful, elite, and private minority associations as a trade-off for welcoming the rise of greater civic and political participation by the people.

As Neem's conclusion suggests, this is a vital topic for political science in America today, with for-profit and non-profit corporations dominating our supposedly democratic political landscape as powerful and well-organized lobbyists; as beneficiaries of executive orders, legislation, and judicial decisions; and as influential contributors to political campaigns. Because his book explores how the growth of corporations in early nineteenth-century Massachusetts helped propel voluntarism and a vibrant civil society, Neem paid homage to Arthur M. Schlesinger in titling the book Creating a Nation of Joiners. But, given his sympathy for the Jeffersonian-Olsonian critique of the power of corporations to corrode popular sovereignty in democracy, Neem might have more aptly—and edgily—called the book “Creating a Nation of Corporations.”