Unity and Community in the Twenty-First Century

"Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition, are forever forming associations," the French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville observed in his famous 1835 tract, Democracy in America. "There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types -- religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute