Tocqueville Found America's Secret in the Barn Raising and the Town Meeting

Picture a farm family in the 1830s whose barn burned down in October. This is a hypothetical, a composite of the kind of thing that happened on the American frontier again and again, but it is a fair picture. No insurance adjuster arrives. No agency opens a claims window. There is no hotline. There is a family with a hole in its life, a winter coming on, and a neighborhood. On a Saturday morning in the spring, wagons begin to roll up the lane. The men bring tools and the women bring pies. By evening a frame stands where ash used to be. Nobody sent an invoice, and nobody expected a plaque.

A young Frenchman passing through the United States around that time thought the scene was the most important thing about the country, though he did not use that particular example. He wrote it down, in two volumes that people still read nearly two centuries later. His name was Alexis de Tocqueville, and his central observation was that Americans, when they see a problem, do not wait for the king, the lord or the minister. They form a committee. That habit, he thought, was the secret of American liberty. And he also saw what would happen if the habit died.

The visitor and the book

Tocqueville was a French aristocrat in his twenties who came to America in 1831 with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, officially to study the American prison system. The two spent roughly nine months traveling, and what Tocqueville took home became Democracy in America, published in two volumes, in 1835 and 1840. The first volume is mostly about American institutions: townships, states, courts, the Constitution, the press, and the tyranny of the majority. The second is about the habits of the heart that democracy produces.

He was not an American partisan. He was a skeptical European trying to figure out whether democracy would end in freedom or in a new kind of servitude, and he was trying to explain to his own countrymen how a republic could work. That outside perspective is why his observations still carry weight. He noticed things that Americans did not notice because Americans were doing them.

Townships: liberty's classroom

The first thing he praised was the New England township. In the first volume he observed that town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science: they put it within the people's reach and teach them how to use and enjoy it. In a town meeting, ordinary citizens argued about the road, the school and the poor-box, and then voted. Nobody at that meeting was a professional politician. They were farmers, shopkeepers, and craftsmen who learned by doing what it means to govern themselves in small things, and the skill carried upward.

That is worth underlining. Tocqueville thought free habits start local. A people who have never run a school board or a volunteer fire company are poorly prepared to run a nation. The township was the nursery. If you want to see what that looks like today, our guide to open meetings and public records, a citizen's toolkit for any local government shows how any citizen can walk into a local government meeting, and running for local office, the first thirty days, step by step shows how to start.

Associations: the American habit

Then came the observation that has made him famous. In the second volume he wrote that Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations. They have commercial and industrial associations, but also thousands of others: religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or tiny. Americans, he reported, combine to give entertainments, found seminaries, build inns, construct churches, distribute books, and send missionaries to the other side of the world. They found hospitals, prisons and schools the same way.

And then he drew the contrast. Wherever, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France or a great lord in England, in the United States you are sure to find an association. In France, you wait for the state. In England, you wait for a patron. In America, you call a meeting.

You can see the habit in America's own history. Benjamin Franklin, in Philadelphia, formed a debating club called the Junto around 1727, founded a subscription library, the Library Company, in 1731, and helped organize a volunteer fire brigade, the Union Fire Company, in 1736. He did not petition the Pennsylvania legislature. He gathered friends, set the rules, collected dues and got to work. Later generations built fraternal lodges that provided burial insurance and sick benefits, churches that ran schools and relief, and mutual-aid societies of immigrants. The historian David Beito documented the scale of these fraternal societies in his book From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State (2000), and the lesson is that before there was a federal safety net, there was already a thick net of voluntary ones, woven by people who knew each other.

Why it mattered to him

Tocqueville gave two reasons.

The first was practical. Associations get things done without anyone being compelled. The second was subtler: associations teach people to cooperate, and the habit of cooperating is how a free people protects itself against a strong government. In a society of equals, he wrote, each individual is weak. A single citizen can do almost nothing, and the state is a giant. If the citizens have no habit of combining, they will find that the only power that can act is the government.

That brings us to the warning.

The danger he named

Near the end of the second volume, Tocqueville described a kind of tyranny he thought democratic nations had reason to fear, one unlike the whips and chains of the old despotisms. Picture, he said, an immense and tutelary power, absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild, which takes upon itself alone the task of securing the citizens' enjoyments and watching over their fate. It would resemble parental authority if its aim were to prepare people for adulthood, but it aims instead to keep them in perpetual childhood. It is content that the citizens enjoy themselves, provided they think of nothing but enjoyment. It works for their happiness but wants to be the sole agent and judge of it. It provides their security, foresees their needs, directs their industry and manages their estates.

Readers today usually call this "soft despotism," though that is not his own term. The important thing is the mechanism. Such a power does not break the will of the people. It softens, bends and guides it, until each nation becomes a flock of timid animals with the government as shepherd. And it works in the first place because people have stopped doing things for themselves and for each other.

Conservatives have been rereading that passage ever since. It describes not a coup, but a trade: a little responsibility handed over for a little security, and then another, until the citizens have forgotten how to do what they once did. It is the reverse of the barn raising. For why responsibility and freedom travel together, see Liberty Without Responsibility Is a Very Short Road to Losing Both.

The modern echo: Bowling Alone

You do not have to be a conservative to see what Tocqueville saw. Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist who is not a conservative, published an essay in 1995 and a book in 2000, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, arguing that Americans had been withdrawing from civic life for decades. His title came from a striking observation: the number of Americans who bowled had risen, but the number who bowled in organized leagues had fallen. The people were still bowling. They were doing it without each other.

Putnam described this loss as a decline in "social capital," the networks, norms and trust that let people cooperate. He examined memberships in parent-teacher associations, civic clubs, churches, unions and fraternal organizations, and he pointed to a long list of possible causes: the rise of television, the pressure of two-career households and long commutes, suburban sprawl, and the generational replacement of civic-minded older Americans with younger ones less inclined to join. He did not blame the government for the decline, and he did not pin it on one party. But the shape of the finding is Tocquevillian. A people who stop forming associations are not becoming freer. They are becoming lonelier, and more dependent on whoever is left to act.

Every task handed to the state crowds out a neighbor

Here is where I will make the conservative argument directly. Edmund Burke wrote in 1790 that to be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle of public affections. The sociologist Robert Nisbet, in The Quest for Community in 1953, argued that when the state expands, the middle layers of society, the family, the congregation, the guild and the neighborhood, tend to shrink, until all that is left is the individual and the government. We discuss the same instinct in Subsidiarity Is the Old Idea Behind Keeping Power as Close to Home as Possible.

The mechanism is not mysterious.

1. A job done by the state removes the reason to organize. If the county will plow the road, plow it better and charge you for it, then the neighborhood no longer has a plow committee, and no longer meets.
2. The skills of cooperation atrophy. People who have never run a meeting, kept a treasury or settled a dispute among neighbors are not ready to do it when the need arises.
3. The state's version is rarely cheaper and almost never warmer. A food bank run by a church knows who is hungry on Elm Street. An agency may know a case number.
4. When the next problem comes, the habit is gone. The people look to the one institution that can still act, and the cycle runs again.

This is not a claim that government does nothing useful. It builds the roads, runs the courts, defends the border. The claim is narrower: the burden of proof should lie on the one who wants to move a job upward. Ask whether a family, a congregation, a club or a town could do it first. The family is the first such institution, as The Family Is the Original Welfare State and the Cheapest One argues, and the congregation is the second. For one concrete example, see A church food pantry checklist, from IRS rules to dignity at the door.

The honest objections

Three objections deserve a fair hearing.

"Voluntary groups are not always good." True. Tocqueville himself worried about associations that could become tools of a faction, and history has plenty of associations that served ugly ends. Association is a habit, not a guarantee of virtue. But the answer to bad associations is better ones and equal law, not the elimination of the habit.

"Private charity was overwhelmed in the Great Depression." It was. When a quarter of the workforce lost jobs, no network of lodges and churches could absorb the shock, and the country turned to Washington. A conservative should concede that some problems are too big for the smallest unit, which is the point of the subsidiarity principle: the larger body steps in where the smaller cannot, and no further. The dispute is over how quickly the temporary becomes the permanent, and who gets to say when the emergency is over.

"Tocqueville was not against government." Correct, and I do not claim he was. He admired local government, wrote that centralization of administration was a danger, and also thought a strong, lawful national government had its place. He wanted the two to balance. The problem he flagged is imbalance.

What to do about it on a Saturday

If this all sounds like nostalgia, the cure is practical. Tocqueville's secret is a muscle, and muscles respond to use.

• Join something that meets in person. A volunteer fire company, a booster club, a church committee, a Little League board, a county fair association.
• Show up to one local government meeting a year. Even a boring one. Sit in the back. See who is doing the work.
• Organize the small thing. A meal train for a new mother, a work party for a widow's gutters, a neighborhood cleanup. A barn raising is only a work party with a better story.
• Teach it. Take your kids with you. A child who has watched a community build something is a child who will not wait for permission to build.

The bottom line

• Tocqueville, writing in 1835 and 1840, found that Americans solve problems by forming associations, and that this habit is the training ground of freedom.
• He also warned about a mild, paternal government that keeps its citizens in perpetual childhood by doing everything for them.
• Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone (2000) found a modern echo in the decline of civic membership, and he is no conservative.
• Every job moved to the government is a job a neighbor no longer does, so ask first whether a family, church, club or town could do it.
• Do one thing this month: join a group, attend a meeting, or organize a small project. The republic is built out of Saturdays.