Why bother to join a formal organization, with rules, membership fees, and regular meetings to do something that could be done just as well alone or informally among friends? This question, Butterfield argues, sat at the center of the construction of voluntary associations across the early republic in the United States: How did the United States become a country of joiners in which voluntary associations proliferated in every direction to manage every interest, from the most important to the most mundane, in spite of the tremendous resistance to intermediary bodies in the wake of the Revolutionary War? Indeed, regardless of the extraordinary elaboration of civil society that Alexis de Tocqueville witnessed during his visit in the 1830s, attempts to form voluntary associations—from Freemasonry to the Society of Cincinnati—confronted a profound uneasiness in the early United States Republic.
The response, Butterfield argues, was to cultivate law-minded ways of forming and conducting...