Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Spring 2011
Abstract
Alexis de Tocqueville watched with horror as American society and politics changed in the two decades following the publication of Democracy in America. During the 1840s and 1850s, the factors that Tocqueville had earlier identified as sustaining the republic—its land and location, its laws, and its mores—had begun to undermine it. Recent work on civil society, the public sphere, and social capital is congruent with a Tocquevillian analysis of the causes of the Civil War. The associational networks that had once functioned as bridging social capital fractured under the stress of slavery, becoming sources of divisive regional, bonding social capital.
Publication Title
Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Volume
41
Issue
4
First Page
591
Last Page
618
Recommended Citation
Neem, Johann N., "Taking Modernity's Wager: Tocqueville, Social Capital, and the American Civil War" (2011). History Faculty and Staff Publications. 17.
https://cedar.wwu.edu/history_facpubs/17
Subjects - Topical (LCSH)
Democracy--United States; Civil society--United States
Subjects - Names (LCNAF)
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805-1859
Geographic Coverage
United States--Politics and government; United States--Social conditions
Genre/Form
articles
Type
Text
Language
English
Format
application/pdf
