America is a nation of joiners. When the French aristocrat and political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the early 1830s, he was astonished at all the ways Americans associated. He wrote, “Of all countries in the world, America has taken greatest advantage of association and has applied this powerful means of action to the greatest variety of objectives.”
In America, Tocqueville saw that ordinary people on their own initiative got together to solve problems and to pursue shared goals.
The American art of association was so extraordinary to Tocqueville because Europe had long relied upon either the aristocracy—persons of wealth and prestige who headed their own estates—or the government to do the sorts of things that Americans did through associations. Tocqueville writes, “Wherever, at the head of a new undertaking, you see in France the government, and in England, a great lord, count on seeing in the United States, an association.” Americans had no aristocrats, nor did we want them, nor—and this is important—did we need them. And we didn’t seem to need the government, either.
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