The intellectual tradition that emphasizes the importance of voluntary associations, local institutions, and intermediate groups standing between the individual and the state. Tocqueville is one of the founding figures of modern thinking about civil society. His analysis of American voluntary associations as the foundation of democratic vitality remains influential today. The concept has been revived in contemporary discussions of social capital, democratic decline, and the conditions for political pluralism.
Tradition
Civil Society
The intellectual tradition that emphasizes the importance of voluntary associations, local institutions, and intermediate groups standing between the individual and the state.
Thinkers
Thinker
Robert Nisbet
Robert Nisbet was a conservative American sociologist who argued that the modern state's growth hollowed out the communities and mediating institutions on which liberty depends
ThinkerAlexis de Tocqueville
1805–1859
Alexis de Tocqueville was an aristocrat by birth and a liberal by conviction whose Democracy in America remains the most insightful analysis of democratic society ever written by an outsider
ThinkerBooker T. Washington
1856–1915
Booker T. Washington was the most powerful African American leader of his era, advocating economic self-improvement over political agitation while secretly funding legal challenges to segregation
ThinkerPeter Drucker
Peter Drucker was a pluralist social thinker, conservative in temperament yet reformist in aim, who sought a middle path between unregulated capitalism and state planning through decentralized, self-governing institutions
Defining tradition for
Related through shared thinkers