Civil society and democracy in nineteenth century Europe: Entanglements, variations, conflicts

It is ironic that the travelogue of a French aristocrat became one of the canonical texts of American democracy. Even today, American liberals and conservatives rely on De la Démocratie en Amérique to support their arguments and assume that Tocqueville’s insights, including his conviction that voluntary associations are the bedrock of American democracy, are still relevant today. However, in a historical and transnational perspective, Tocqueville’s famous passages in Democracy in America are as unexceptional as the American society of his time, given the enthusiasm for associative sociability by eighteenth and nineteenth-century practitioners of civil society in France, Germany, the Habsburg Empire and Russia. Revisiting the history of these “sociable societies” provides an answer to the question whether voluntary associations can be considered schools for democracy or not.