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The Making of Tocqueville's America: Law and Association in the Early United States (American Beginnings, 1500-1900) by Kevin Butterfield is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is The Making of Tocqueville's America: Law and Association in the Early United States (American Beginnings, 1500-1900) about?

Alexis de Tocqueville was among the first to draw attention to Americans’ propensity to form voluntary associations—and to join them with a fervor and frequency unmatched anywhere in the world. For nearly two centuries, we have sought to understand how and why early nineteenth-century Americans were, in Tocqueville’s words, “forever forming associations.” In __The Making of Tocqueville’s America__, Kevin Butterfield argues that to understand this, we need to first ask: what did membership really __mean__ to the growing number of affiliated Americans? Butterfield explains that the first generations of American citizens found in the concept of membership—in churches, fraternities, reform societies, labor unions, and private business corporations—a mechanism to balance the tension between collective action and personal autonomy, something they accomplished by emphasizing law and procedural fairness. As this post-Revolutionary procedural culture developed, so too did the legal substructure of American civil society. Tocqueville, then, was wrong to see associations as the training ground for democracy, where people learned to honor one another’s voices and perspectives. Rather, they wer

Who reads The Making of Tocqueville's America: Law and Association in the Early United States (American Beginnings, 1500-1900)?

Author

Kevin Butterfield

Publisher

The University of Chicago Press The University of Chicago Press

Published

2015

Language

EN

ISBN

9780226297118

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

Social Science, Political Science, Social_sciences

Rating

5 / 5 (2 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14