In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat, toured the United States and was astonished by the obsessive organizational energy of its citizens. “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations… of a thousand other kinds—religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive,” Tocqueville wrote. “Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes.… If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster
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