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  • What, Me Join?The Contested Development of Voluntarism in Early National Massachusetts
  • Liam Riordan (bio)
Johann N. Neem . Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. 259 pp. Notes and index. $49.95.

This concise book explores the origins of voluntary associations in post-Revolutionary War Massachusetts, especially "how Americans themselves conceptualized civil society and the public sphere" and how the contours of each "changed in response to new ideas and circumstances" (p. 7). The state constitution of 1780 provides a starting point to fix the relationship between the state and civil society that underwent major changes, examined especially through partisan arguments and legal decisions. The central problem is well posed: "Although few Americans were volunteers in 1776, by the 1830s it could truly be said that America was a nation of joiners" (p. 82). Johann N. Neem argues with admirable clarity that three key groups shaped this contested development: evangelical middle-class reformers who mobilized a grassroots public sphere; elite Whigs who championed philanthropic action that, building on Federalist precursors, hoped to transcend popular opinion; and a Jacksonian Democratic fear of private power that condemned both the others and extended a Jeffersonian commitment to legitimate public action primarily via direct democracy. As Neem explains the relationship between these three groups near the end of his book, when abolitionists pushed the demands of voluntary associations to radical extremes: "The debate over slavery thus brought to a head tensions between the Whigs' elite public sphere and the evangelicals' grassroots public sphere, and Democrats' hostility to both" (p. 164).

While political and legal arguments over associations and corporations constitute the core of this study, Neem's brief introduction provides definitions of key concepts and the book's historiograhic context. His operative concept is civil society defined as "the realm of voluntary associations and nonprofit corporations that are neither part of the state nor primarily interested in profit." Yet, as the author notes, even so general a definition isn't wholly satisfactory, [End Page 443] since eighteenth-century "institutions of civil society . . . were much more closely tied to and dependent on the state" (p. 183 n. 4). Acknowledging the towering place of Jurgen Habermas' philosophical ideal-type approach to the bourgeois public sphere, Neem emphasizes that the critical difference between U.S. and European settings lies in the broad American acceptance of popular sovereignty that triggered conflict over how best to define "the people" and implement their will in a republican polity. While the meanings and conceptual relationship between the terms "public sphere" and "civil society" (seemingly used interchangeably here) might have benefited from additional assessment and theoretical consideration, the very difficulty of providing consistent definitions for them during the early republic is itself an indication of the sweeping changes that Creating a Nation of Joiners examines.

Neem draws intelligently and fluidly on a large secondary literature in political science, sociology, and, of course, history. The most important historiographical context for this study comes from books and essays by leading scholars such as John L. Brooke, Peter Dobkin Hall, Richard R. John, Mary P. Ryan, and Theda Skocpol—as well as Albrecht Koschnik's recent monograph "Let a Common Interest Bind Us Together": Associations, Partisanship, and Culture in Philadelphia, 1775-1840 (2007). The latter, like the book under review here, began as a dissertation under the direction of Peter S. Onuf at the University of Virginia. Neem usefully adds to wide-ranging recent work analyzing the rapid changes in U.S. political culture in the wake of the American Revolution, and he makes an original contribution by focusing on private institutions that played increasingly influential public roles while standing outside direct control by the government. Neem also draws on earlier scholarship, especially Oscar Handlin and Mary Flug Handlin's, Commonwealth: A Study in the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts 1774-1861 (rev. ed. 1969; orig. 1947); and the book's title builds explicitly on Arthur M. Schlesinger's "Biography of a Nation of Joiners," American Historical Review (1944). While much of that older literature (and ongoing popular understanding) scrutinized American voluntarism from a Tocquevillian vantage point steeped in Cold War...

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