on the Anglo-American model there are three key social arenas: the state, individuals, and civil society. It is the third sector, civil society, that is seen as most vital to the health of democracy, because that is where we come together at a local level, forming moral communities where people help one another in face-to-face and side-by-side relationships, to do together what we cannot do alone. It is this area, smaller than the state but bigger than the individual, that creates and sustains what Tocqueville called the ‘art of association’, and that he held to be the necessary
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