Alexis de Tocqueville famously argued that voluntary associations among citizens were the necessary corrective to the atomizing influences of democracy. One of those influences, he argued, was a tendency to promote individualism in the life of the mind, which in turn risked a public intellectual life dominated by the whims of popular fancy. Taking this concern as a point of departure, this paper proposes to chart the rise and decline of communal intellectual life in America. In Part 1, I deal with the history of America's most influential movements of what I call "Citizen Learning," movements of communal, voluntary, public intellectual life. In this section, I argue that these movements had a salutary effect on American public thinking, answering Tocqueville's concerns by promoting thinking as part of a community, developing tolerance of differences, and sharpening healthy habits of the heart and mind with respect to public conversation. In Part 2, I explore the reasons for the loss of these movements and the effect of their loss on our intellectual culture. Applying the research of contemporary sociologists to the question of communal intellectual life, I argue that the loss of these in-person, local intellectual institutions has been a factor in creating a public intellectual life that is more polarized, more radical, and more distrustful.
Nathan Beacom (Thu,) studied this question.