ASSOCIATIONS, VOLUNTARY

In the mid-eighteenth century, a plethora of new forms of sociability—beyond the traditional bonds of family, state, court, and the established church—arose in the cities of the European-controlled world. In contrast to those older forms, voluntary entry was the most important criterion for the new clubs, Masonic lodges, and reading, charitable, and learning societies. Socially open in theory, the new associations gave themselves formal rules, rituals, and constitutions; assumed the equality of their members; and formulated common goals, in most cases in the realm of moral improvement. Members were to learn to govern themselves, their interests, and passions, and to shape, both morally and politically, all of society on their utopian model. Though many of the old elites belonged to these associations, the demand for self-organization and enlightenment implicitly called the political order of the old regime into question. In nineteenth-century Europe, voluntary associations became the most important organizing principle of civil society; they formed a dense and vibrant network of civic activism beyond church, state, and corporation, and were a vehicle for the most important political ideologies of the time: liberalism, nationalism, and socialism.

tocqueville's question

The United States is still seen today as the classic nation of joiners. One reason for this is that Alexis de Tocqueville's (1805–1859) De la démocratie en Amérique (Democracy in America), the most important text on the political theory of voluntary associations (appearing in two volumes in 1835 and 1840), is based on examples from his trip through North America. Tocqueville marveled at the way Americans—in contrast, he thought, to continental Europeans—participated in countless associations, thereby breathing life into their democracy. Instead of appealing to a state authority to solve their problems, Americans founded an association, taking their lives into their own hands and working for the common good. For these reasons, the freedom of association, more than even freedom of the press, was, for Tocqueville, one of the most important rights in a democracy.

But Tocqueville was interested in more than the associations' purely practical significance, for he saw feelings and habits of the heart as more important for the polity than rationally thought-out rights and interests. He was convinced that a polity was formed not only by its written constitution, but also by the inner constitution and virtue of its citizens. The deciding question for Tocqueville was how to avoid the spiritual impoverishment that threatens people in a democratic society and opens the door to despotism and terror. The Terror of the French Revolution was never far from his thoughts.

Tocqueville saw an answer to this problem in voluntary associations. According to Tocqueville, only in social interaction could people develop their ideas and enlarge their hearts. This interaction, which was subordinated to strict rules in corporate societies, had to be brought to life voluntarily in a democracy—a task only associations could perform. Associations for moral improvement, seemingly apolitical and above special interests, freed the individual from his selfishness and created new bonds in modern, egalitarian societies. "Among the laws that rule human societies," writes Tocqueville, "there is one that seems more precise and clearer than all others. In order that men remain civilized or become so, the art of associating must be developed and perfected among them in the same ratio as equality of conditions increases" (Democracy in America, p. 492). Conversely, he thought, if the bonds between individuals loosen, democracy's political foundation will erode. The less citizens practice the art of association, the greater the toll on their civility and the greater likelihood that equality will degenerate into despotism.

entanglements and variations

Research in the 1990s has shown that nineteenth-century "practitioners of civil society" on both sides of the Atlantic believed in the political significance of sociability and civic virtue. The high (and widespread) esteem of voluntary associations was not just an American phenomenon, but rather part of an entangled history of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European and transatlantic world. Following the American historian Philip Nord, one can discern, after the initial growth of sociability in the Enlightenment (a period that came to an end in the French Revolution and will not be covered in what follows), three phases between the French Revolution and World War I in the transnational spread and entanglement of voluntary associations.

Refuge of the middle class

Historians generally consider the three decades before the European revolutions of 1848–1849 as the heyday of voluntary associations. Simultaneously with the United States, where the years between 1825 and 1845 are known as the "era of associations," a first burst of civic activism formed a dense network of associations in English, French, and German cities. The voluntary associations, which at this time were socially exclusive and open, for the most part, only to educated and propertied men, were supposed to provide relief from conflicts in career, family, and politics. The associations, of course, also fulfilled immediate social or political goals: they blurred boundaries with respect to the nobility and differentiated themselves even more starkly from the lower classes. Nevertheless, it is also clear that one reason for the nineteenth-century passion for association lies in the political and moral understanding of the same problems inherent in a rapidly changing society that Tocqueville had described so forcefully.

Socially, an important difference between the growth of sociability in the Enlightenment and voluntary associations in early nineteenth-century England, France, or Germany is the participation of the middle classes—middle-class men, to be more precise, because the strict and obsessive exclusion of women was one of the hallmarks of nineteenth century associations. Social historians have described voluntary associations as a means by which western European middle classes attempted to exert cultural hegemony and overcome the deep social, political, and economic crises in the decades after 1800. Progress and improvement were key concepts for these associations that claimed moral leadership of society. Thus, even the first working men's clubs and gymnastics societies came under the auspices of the middle classes.

However, the idea and practice of civil society was not bound solely to the rising bourgeoisie as a social class. Several popular as well as aristocratic sociable traditions continued into the early nineteenth

century and merged with the associational ideal. Moreover, the associational ideal crossed social and national borders, emerging even in societies—like Austria-Hungary and Russia—without a strong middle class.

Eastern central Europe's own associational life, though delayed, began to emerge in the 1830s, particularly in reading societies, clubs, and charitable organizations. Hungarian nobles enthusiastic for reform brought liberal ideas back home from their trips to France, England, and Germany. Clubs founded in the period from 1825 to 1827 by the Hungarian liberal Count Istvan Széchenyi (1791–1860) after a trip through England promoted entertainment and social interaction, and especially education through reading the foreign press. This was the beginning of an association-based reform movement in Hungary, which in a few years had clubs and associations in all important provincial towns, and by 1845 had an estimated 500 associations total. It is not without reason that Prince Clemens von Metternich (1773–1859), the conservative state chancellor of the Habsburg Empire, is said to have called associations a "German plague." Associations formed in Berlin spread from Prague to Vienna, and from there to Buda, Pest, and the provincial towns of Austria-Hungary. They spread to Russia in a similar fashion, particularly to St. Petersburg and Moscow.

The revolutions of 1848–1849 mark the high point and end of this first phase of civic activism. Many associations ceased to exist with the failure of the liberal movement in central Europe and the onset of government repression. But not for long.

Nations of joiners

The passion for association in the first half of the century turned out to be only a prelude to the "club mania," as it was soon to be called, in the two decades after Tocqueville's death (1859). This second upsurge in civic activism occurred simultaneously in western and eastern Europe where industrialization and urbanization had given rise to similarly far-reaching social upheavals and had strengthened the will for liberal reform of society. Again, England, where developments in voluntary associations typical for the 1860s and 1870s had begun a half-century earlier, is the lone exception. The density of associations clearly fell off as one moved east. Surprisingly, however, similarities—in the types of associations, the motives for their founding, and the moment of their increase—abound in this second burst of activity.

In Russia's western provincial towns after the Crimean War and during the era of great reforms, particularly after the abolition of serfdom, the first signs of a local civil society emerged and began forming voluntary associations. They met alongside the zemstvos, the local governing bodies created after 1864, and existing informal social groups like circles and salons. The social range of voluntary associations in the tsarist empire also widened, though relatively modestly. The thin layer of the educated and propertied middle class rapidly discovered these associations for themselves.

In continental Europe, the liberalization of states that became nations (or multinational in the case of Austria-Hungary) is likewise tied to an increase in voluntary associations. Historians have only recently realized how associational life exploded after 1860 in local urban society of the French and German provinces. It seemed that the liberal utopia was becoming a reality: a step-by-step reform of society under bourgeois-liberal auspices and without revolutionary violence. Contemporary statistics include only officially registered associations and therefore must be used with care. Nevertheless, one can still discern distinct trends. For example, in 1868 all of Cisleithania, the Austrian part of the empire, had around 5,200 associations, 8,000 already by 1870, and experienced almost a doubling in each of the next three decades: to 15,000 in 1880, over 30,000 in 1890, just short of 60,000 in 1900, and 103,000 in 1910.

The gymnastics movement illustrates the new problems that lay behind this sharp increase in associations. One of the century's most popular types of association, gymnastics clubs began forming in the German states with the Napoleonic Wars, stagnated after the suppression of the revolutions of 1848–1849, and revived in central Europe at the beginning of the 1860s. Contemporary statistics from 1862 indicate 1,284 gymnastics clubs with 134,507 members in the German states; the overwhelming majority of these new associations came into being during the previous two and half years. By 1864 the number of gymnastics clubs had almost doubled. The number sank toward the end of the 1860s under the pressure of the wars of 1866 and 1870–1871, but a few years later again began to grow enormously—and not only in the German Kaiserreich but in France as well. Before World War I, the Deutsche Turnerschaft (German Gymnast Society) counted 1.4 million members, and the Union des Sociétés Francaises de Gymnastique had over 300,000.

In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, gymnastics became one of the most popular pastime activities for young men in both countries, with the clubs promoting physical and moral-political education and the militarization of social life. Similar to the German movement's rise out of German military defeat, French gymnastics clubs grew wildly after the military humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War. Both the German and French gymnastics clubs were markedly nationalistic, as were the Czech Sokol clubs founded throughout Habsburg Bohemia in the 1860s; they all stressed the importance of physical and moral fitness for the social improvement of the nation. This rise in civic activism was thus accompanied with increased militarism and nationalism.

Civic activism, connected histories

This tendency to combine social participation with nationalism was even more pronounced in the third surge (from the 1890s to about 1910) in civic activism. At no other point did associations permeate social life in Europe as strongly as in these two decades. Hardly a segment of society was not touched by this transnational club mania. Even opponents of the club mania founded associations so as not to remain alone in their displeasure. In those countries that already had a developed associational life, the numbers exploded and reached rural society and the European colonies extensively for the first time.

Again, ideas and social practices moved across national borders. For example, in the mass emigrations beginning in the 1880s, approximately half a million predominantly rural "Slovaks," few of whom would have identified themselves as Slovaks, moved to the United States. There they founded, like almost all other immigrant groups, their own voluntary associations and began for the first time to see themselves as Slovaks in an ethnic sense. About a fourth to a third of them returned with this experience to their home country and founded associations. There was a true export of forms of voluntary association across national borders. Another example is the B'nai Brith order, which took the Masonic lodge as its model. The order was founded by German Jewish emigrants in New York in 1843 and spread to the European continent starting in the 1880s, partly as a reaction to the anti-Semitism that was particularly rampant in central Europe.

Victorian reform societies, like learning societies or the temperance movement, even spread their message of moral improvement and alcoholic abstinence to Russia. Often, as in the case of temperance societies, the impulse to reform fed on doubts about the legitimacy of Russia's autocratic regime. As in other associations for social reform (e.g., the fight against prostitution), middle-class women played an independent role. Prostitution and alcoholism were seen as problems that would not be solved by the state but by civil society. Charitable organizations, which also belong to this category, registered another dramatic increase at this time. More than half of the 2,200 charitable organizations counted by the Russian state in the early twentieth century were formed after 1890. The actual number of organizations was surely much higher, as many charitable organizations of national minorities, especially of Jews, were not counted in the government numbers. According to contemporary estimates, 4,800 new associations and societies were formed in Russia between 1906 and 1909 alone. Sociable life in Moscow and St. Petersburg was hardly different from that of Europe's other major cities, and the passion for association reached, though modestly, into the sleepy provincial towns.

civil society and the state

If, according to Tocqueville, voluntary associations are essential to the life of a democracy, how can one explain their significance for nineteenth-century European societies? In the end, with the exception of France after 1871, all of these societies were, at best, constitutional monarchies, and none of them granted the unrestricted freedom of association in the nineteenth century. Rather, there was a successive loosening of the prohibition of association: in 1867 in Germany and Austria-Hungary; 1881 in France; and after the Revolution of 1905 in Russia. Clearly one must distinguish between the often-restrictive right to associate, that is, the state's official position on associations, and the actual extent of urban sociability tolerated by the state. Throughout nineteenth-century continental Europe, a society enthusiastic for associations confronted states that tended to be hostile to them. For a long time in the twentieth century, historians' views of civic activism in continental Europe were obstructed by a fixation on the state and an allegedly authoritarian tradition; in those countries, however, like Great Britain and the United States, which see themselves in an unbroken liberal tradition, historians attribute paramount importance to associations as evidence of this tradition.

Moreover, it is not clear that one can so easily draw such a stark distinction between the state and civil society. At times government elites expected societal reform to result from a loosening of the laws governing associations and were often, ironically enough, themselves members of associations that the state was watching. To be sure, after the revolutions of 1789 and 1848, the state tried to suppress the uncontrolled growth of associations. But in the long run, the demand for social and political participation could not be controlled. In the 1860s, Austria-Hungary's government gave in to the demand for a relaxing of the prohibition on association in order to remain on top of the situation. Political associations often remained prohibited while associations devoted to moral or sociable aims were tolerated. In practice, however, this distinction was difficult to maintain, since those associations that were allegedly dedicated to nonpolitical goals aimed, by their very nature, for a self-organized civil society beyond the state. By the 1890s, at the latest, the governments in Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary only seldom, or at most perfunctorily, made use of their right to monitor local sociability. That France (1901) and Germany (1908) enshrined the freedom of association without any restrictions in their law only relatively late is less a result of the allegedly authoritarian character of the state than the fear liberals had of their "uncivil" enemies such as the Catholics and socialists.

democracy and its discontents

At their high point in terms of raw numbers, voluntary associations paradoxically lost, in the eyes of many contemporaries, the moral and political significance Tocqueville and others had once accorded them. Accompanying the wild spread of associational life throughout all levels of society over the course of the century was an increasing fear among liberal elites that they might lose their claim to moral leadership, a claim which they had, up to that point, exercised through their domination of the associations. The more associational culture spread and engaged previously excluded groups, the more shallow sounded the language of virtue and civility. "A Skat club is still a Skat club even if it calls itself 'Freedom Skat Club,"' wrote one observer contemptuously when he surveyed what he considered the philistinism of the countless worker associations supposedly devoted to political and moral improvement. This disintegration of the claim to virtue and moral improvement was, however, a result of social democratization, not its opposite. Across Europe, associational life became increasingly more democratic as, for example, workers, Catholics, and women began using and forming voluntary associations. This democratization was accompanied by a change in associations' goals and aims. At the turn of the twentieth century, these new goals broke apart into their own associations and grew into unions, parties, and federations that gradually did away with the social and moral inheritance of the associational ideal. They now served solely to represent special interests and mobilize their members politically.

Liberal and conservative elites interpreted the political plurality and social popularity of associational self-organization—a hallmark of democracy—as a sign of decline. Anti-Semites and philo-Semites, socialists and Catholics, veterans and pacifists, scientists and occultists, friends of sociability and its enemies—they all gathered in associations that promoted their own objectives. More than anything else, though, nationalism spurred innumerable associations in central Europe, which also bitterly fought each other. The spread of voluntary associations democratized society and gave the previously excluded a place and a voice—not necessarily, though, a deeper belief in the liberal idea of a civil society.

conclusion

The history of nineteenth-century associations reveals three major trends: expansion, democratization, and politicization. Voluntary associations spread in waves, with each wave making the associational network denser and giving rise to new associational goals. This expansion can only be understood against the background of global migration, trade, and communication of ideas and practices. New voluntary associations that arose out of exclusive Enlightenment circles around 1800 set off a true passion for associations in North America and Europe in the 1830s and 1840s. The associations combined enlightened ideas and practices with the contemporary political currents of liberalism, republicanism, socialism, and nationalism, and continental European states tried, with varying degrees of success, to control their citizens' passion for associations. At the same time, the associations' causes multiplied: national, confessional, or social reform associations broadened the spectrum, often with new claims of social exclusivity and moral-political missions. In the 1860s and 1870s a new wave of associations arose, which both helped bring about and was the result of society's liberalization and nationalization. This trend intensified dramatically at the end of the century, when nearly all aspects of urban society in the countries under consideration were organized around associations. The expansion and specialization of voluntary associations produced new forms of organized interests, politics, and modern mass culture that adopted, and went beyond, many of the older associations' goals and aims.

The expansion of voluntary associations led to more social participation and drew, at the same time, new political borders. The era between the French Revolution and World War I surely was not a democratic age, but rather the age of democratization. In a time when none of the states considered here had universal suffrage, nineteenth-century associations served as schools for democracy. Joiners experienced a constitution of statutes, the right to vote and to freedom of speech, and engagement for self-defined causes and goals; but also the often-related experience of everyday conflicts and frustrations that are part and parcel of democracy. In this sense, those associations dedicated to nonpolitical or trivial causes (measured by twenty-first-century standards) also had a democratizing effect. However, the secret ballot in voluntary associations could serve not only as practice in democracy, but also as a mechanism for excluding those who did not meet specific social or moral criteria. The desire to participate in social and political life and to have one's own social spaces and practices was, consequently, an important driving force behind the ever new waves of association formation in the long nineteenth century, in spite of—or, rather, because of—experiences of exclusion. The increasing competition between voluntary associations and their political and moral ideas, and the resulting conflicts within civil society, were not a sign of the decline of associational life but rather of its democratization. Voluntary associations no longer served to secure a small elites' political and moral claim to leadership and their vision of social harmony, but rather cleared the way for new forms and institutions that would shape political demands.

Democratization also brought with it a politicization of voluntary associations in all the societies under consideration. Enlightened sociability experienced an initial politicization before, during, and after the revolutions of the late eighteenth century when the states of continental Europe set off a wave of government repression against the free association of its citizens. Even more noteworthy is the readiness with which the "practitioners of civil society" formed associations in the early nineteenth century. On both sides of the Atlantic, associations served as supposedly nonpolitical, sociable spaces for social and moral improvement of their individual members and society. The related liberal ideas of social harmony and reform competed, beginning in the 1830s and 1840s, with new political-social movements that made use of the associations for shaping of an alternative culture. Not only did they adopt the ideas and practices of civil associations, but also developed their own political and moral ideas of the significance of sociability, thereby making the tension between liberalism and democracy more apparent. Simultaneously, the nationalization and "ethnization" of society, and therefore also of sociability, began, producing a new dynamic in the passion for associations in the 1860s and 1870s. At the end of the century, the passion for associations encompassed nearly all social, confessional, and political groups and aspects of society. However, the more voluntary associations at the turn of the twentieth century became places of self-organization for differentiated and often mutually exclusive social and political actors (and thus an expression of democratic plurality), the more they lost, in the eyes of many of their contemporaries, moral authority and the utopian promise to reform society. They were no longer perceived as a remedy for, but rather as a sign of, the loss of society's cohesion and moral compass—the loss, in other words, of precisely that civic virtue that theorists and practitioners of civil society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had understood as vital for a polity. The expansion, democratization, and politicization of voluntary associations were consequently—and only seemingly paradoxically—causes of the crises of European liberalism and civil society before World War I.

See alsoBourgeoisie; Civil Society; Class and Social Relations; Cooperative Movements; Freemasons; Leisure; Working Class.

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