The answer offered by Alexis de Tocqueville, the great nineteenth-century observer of American society, was a decidedly situationist one. He argued that the physically demanding and socially primitive world of the colonists, coupled with the absence of any preexisting government institutions, required the citizenry to act cooperatively in ad hoc associations of their own construction. The habit of forming and using voluntary associations to pursue shared goals thus taught the skills and techniques of self-governance that are essential to democracy. Tocqueville believed it was no accident that
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