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By Root 1512 0

felt like civil society. Without trying to romanticize the social conditions of that decentralized period, we can see how they allowed liberty a more local and civic aspect, while a modest governmental sphere and an unassuming private sector were overshadowed by an extensive civic network tied together by schools, granges, churches, town halls, village greens, country stores, and voluntary associations of every imaginable sort. It was these “municipal” institutions that fired Tocqueville’s imagination. Government, especially at the federal level, was a modest affair (probably too modest for some of the tasks it needed to accomplish) because the constitution had left all powers not specifically delegated to it to the states and people. Markets were also modest affairs, regional in nature and dominated by other associations and affections.

It was only when individuals who thought of themselves as citizens began to see themselves as consumers, and groups that were regarded as voluntary associations were supplanted by corporations legitimized as “legal persons,” that market forces began to encroach on and crush civil society from the private sector side. Once markets began to expand radically, government responded with an aggressive campaign on behalf of the public weal against the new monopolies, inadvertently crushing civil society from the state side. Squeezed between the warring realms of the two expanding monopolies, statist and corporate, civil society lost its preeminent place in American life. By the time of the two Roosevelts it had nearly vanished and its civic denizens had been compelled to find sanctuary under the feudal tutelage of either big government (their protectors and social servants) or the private sector, where schools, churches, unions, foundations, and other associations could assume the identity of corporations and aspire to be no more than special interest groups formed for the particularistic ends of their members. Whether those ends were, say, market profitability or environmental preservation, was irrelevant since by definition all private associations necessarily had private ends. Schools became interest groups for people with children (parents) rather than the forges of a free society; churches became confessional special interest groups pursuing separate agendas rather than sources of moral fiber for the larger society (as Tocqueville had thought they would be); voluntary associations became a variation on private lobbies rather than the free spaces where women and men practiced an apprenticeship of liberty.

Paradoxically, once civil society had been privatized and commercialized, groups organized in desperate defense of the public interest found themselves cast as mere exemplars of plundering private interest lobbies. Unions, for example, though concerned with fair compensation, full employment, and the dignity of work for all became the private sector counterparts of the corporations, and in time learned all too well how to act the part. When they tried to break the stranglehold of corporations over labor, they were deemed another “special interest” group no better than those against whom they struck, and perhaps worse (since the companies struck were productive contributors to the wealth of America). Environmental groups have undergone the same transmogrification more recently. Although pursuing what for all the world looks like a public agenda of clean air for all including the polluters, they are cast as the polluters’ mirror-image twin—another special interest group whose interests are to be arbitrated alongside those of toxic-waste dumpers. The media surrendered their responsibility to inform democracy’s proprietors and became sellers of gossip and wholly owned subsidiaries of private sector proprietors with no responsibilities at all other than to their profit margins. Under such conditions, the “public good” could not and did not survive as a reasonable ideal. Its epitaph was written by David B. Truman, who in his influential 1951 primer The Governmental Process, a book that helped