Many thinkers have alleged that free markets are inimical to a sense of community. According to critics such as Robert Putnam, commercial societies tend to dissociate people from one another and to undermine the basis of civil society. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America seems to present a challenge to this view insofar as he regards the Americans as both exceptionally commercial and uniquely associational. If markets and associations are in tension with one another, how can they coexist in the United States? As Rachael K. Behr and Virgil Henry Storr argue in this chapter, a closer attention to Democracy in America suggests several ways in which commercial society and the spirit of association are mutually supportive. Markets foster a complex division of labor that requires mutual cooperation. Markets encourage a sense of enlightened self-interest that teaches citizens how they might engage with one another in mutually beneficial ways. Further, markets facilitate innovations in communication that make it easier for citizens to coordinate and freely associate for political change. Rather than giving rise to Tocqueville’s dreaded pathology of “individualism,” as critics have alleged, markets are instead conducive to active civic engagement and the free association of democratic citizens.

Notwithstanding his reputation in the contemporary United States as a sort of political conservative, Tocqueville in his own lifetime was very much a figure of the centrist-left. In the French politics of his day, Tocqueville was closely associated with various causes of reform, most notably the abolition of slavery. In this chapter, Robert T. Gannett, Jr. reminds us that Tocqueville’s calls for decisive action and concerns with social reform were appreciated by many figures on the political Left in the twentieth century. These Left interpreters of Tocqueville range from postwar intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt and Albert Salomon to latter-day communitarian thinkers such as Robert Putnam and William Galston to community organizers such as Saul Alinsky and Gene Sharp. Gannett reveals how Tocqueville plays a major role in the writings of Alinsky and Sharp and thus indirectly shaped the theory and practice of community organizing as it has come to be known in the United States and throughout the world.

Chapter 6 examines the evolution of associational freedoms from the time of de Tocqueville through the modern era. It begins by discussing the myriad ways in which even nonpolitical associations, organized around a vast variety of topics and causes, helped shape our democracy from the nineteenth through much of the twentieth centuries. Such groups helped politically marginalized individuals such as women and minorities to develop the organizational and leadership skills needed to participate in political life. They also were vehicles that, given a push, could evolve to pursue political objectives. And importantly, such associations permitted citizens possessing a diversity of social and political views to mingle and exchange thoughts. Recently, however, as Robert Putnam has extensively shown, civil society in the United States has collapsed. Instead of participating in broad associations, people are increasingly siloed into narrow groups with shared political and social values, a process that the Internet and social media have vastly exacerbated. The chapter concludes by exploring how certain surviving associations – notably book clubs and beer groups – might present a pattern for how we might bring about an associational revival, and how the Internet might become a tool rather than a barrier in that quest.