Solidarity in America

When a young French aristocrat arrived in Jacksonian America in the 1830s with the ostensible purpose of studying the American prison system, he was impressed by the democratic character he encountered there. The citizens of that still-new Republic, Alexis de Tocqueville thought, evinced a winsome combination of self-reliance and a propensity to form associations of all kinds — churches, schools, clubs, neighborhood and professional organizations — which, by drawing the individual out of the private sphere into a civil society distinct from government, tempered the excesses of both individualism and the state.