A people of the law: Review of Kevin Butterfield’s "The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America: Law and Association in the Early United States"

• Main Author: HENDERSON, Christine Dunn
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2017
• Subjects: Philosophy
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3377; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/4634/viewcontent/APeopleoftheLaw_bkrev_2017_av.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

In The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy: Law and Association in the Early United States, Kevin Butterfield, assistant professor of classics and letters at the University of Oklahoma, focuses on the proliferation of associations in the formative years of the American republic. Butterfield’s concern, however, is slightly different from Tocqueville’s, in that Butterfield is less intrigued by the question of why associations proliferated and how they preserve freedom in a democratic age, and more focused upon how these associations were constituted and functioned in the early American context.