Since Tocqueville, commentators have been impressed by Americans' readiness to participate in the voluntary associations that make up civil society. To Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., for example, his fellow citizens were “a nation of joiners.” The problem, as Johann Neem points out in his excellent study that takes its title from Schlesinger Sr.'s observation, is that this phenomenon has more often than not been taken for granted: historians have tended to assume that the right to associate was immanent in revolutionary ideology. Neem's tightly argued analysis of early national Massachusetts suggests a very different story that locates the roots of a vibrant public sphere in conflict rather than consensus.

The revolutionary generation, Neem argues, was profoundly uneasy about voluntary associations that diverted citizens from the pursuit of a common good. Federalists especially believed that only the state could speak for the people and saw the institutionalization of private interests as a threat. Democratic Republican clubs, in challenging the legitimacy of the state, presented the biggest danger. Forced onto the defensive by the Whisky Rebellion, though, Jeffersonians began to claim that they were one voice in a pluralistic public sphere that stood separate from but subordinate to the state.

Partisan competition drew Federalists too towards a reluctant defense of an independent civil society. To shield public institutions like Harvard from the influence of their Republican rivals, party leaders stressed the private rights corporations enjoyed. Neem therefore sees the Supreme Court's ruling in Dartmouth College v. Woodward as a bittersweet victory for Federalists who still clung to the idea of a common good unmediated by private interests. Jeffersonians meanwhile reluctantly defended corporate rights in order to protect the institutions they had chartered as rivals to Federalist influence.

By 1820 both parties found it expedient to support a civil society detached from the state. But over the course of the following two decades the Second Great Awakening remade America's nascent public sphere. Neem explores in a fascinating chapter how evangelicals learned to use voluntary associations as a form of technology. Grassroots organizers in the sabbatarian, temperance, and anti-slavery movements constituted an influential activist community that reached from the parish to Washington, DC. In the same period, elite Whigs tried to protect experts from the levelling tendencies of Jacksonian democracy by establishing independent commissions for the regulation of education and banking.

Democrats saw dangers both to the reformist zeal of grassroots activists and to the elitism of Whig professionals. But unable to override corporate prerogatives they turned instead to a liberal charter policy that was designed to break monopolies by democratizing the right to associate. To Neem, then, the roots of Jacksonian laissez-faire ideology lie in politics, not economics. In an unlikely alliance with orthodox churchgoers, Massachusetts Democrats managed to disestablish the public religious system in early 1833, and a year later the legislature awarded voluntary churches the right to incorporate. Meanwhile, the party saw the decentralization of government as a way to minimize the influence of elite experts, weaken the grip of grassroots campaigners, and, by keeping politics local, ensure that controversial issues like slavery were kept out of the public sphere.

In his conclusion Neem points to the persistence of the conceptions of civil society he identifies in early national Massachusetts. The elite public sphere envisaged by the Whigs found institutional expression in civil service reform in the late nineteenth century; the heirs of the evangelical reformers joined the struggle for prohibition and civil rights; and the Jeffersonians' hostility to private associations inspired generations of populist reformers who continue to decry the role of interest groups in American politics. While respecting the achievements of the first two traditions, Neem's sympathies seem to lie with the latter, and his book may be read as a republican plea for a vigilant citizenry.

Though the author makes a compelling case for the historical contingency of the “nation of joiners,” by rooting his argument in partisan conflict, ideological negotiation, and religious change there is little room for exploring how the social upheavals of the market revolution shaped civil society. Whether Americans steeped in revolutionary ideology really saw a corporation like Harvard through the same lens as they viewed a voluntary association of journeymen is questionable, and here a little more attention to the economic battles of the 1830s especially may have helped. Nevertheless this is a fine study that sheds light not only on the early national era but also on the public life of contemporary America.