Explain the development of the American Reform Movement. Your essay should begin with Alexis de Tocqueville, should also highlight the following; the communitarian Societies (both secular and religious), and their rise and fall, and finally the various areas that were reformed.
Alexis de Tocqueville entered the College Royal in Metz, at the age of 16 to study philosophy. Noticing that France was moving toward increasing democratization, he looked to the United States as a political model. With the pretext of wanting to study prison reforms in America, Tocqueville obtained permission to travel there in order to gain knowledge of American political development, knowledge which he hoped to use in order to influence France’s political development. De Tocqueville arrived in America during the Second Great Awakening. This was a time when the spirit of Jacksonian democracy was helping to bring about greater equality and more widespread participation in the nation’s political life. He was curious about and impressed by America’s experiment in democracy and how well it worked. After finishing his tour of the United States, he recorded his impressions in a very influential book, Democracy in America. The book was very well received throughout Europe as a highly optimistic account of the American government and society. Tocqueville found both much to admire and to criticize as he traveled the country. Though impressed by the equality of opportunity in the American democracy, he wondered how a society so devoted to materialism and the pursuit of individual self-interest could produce the civic spirit needed for self-government. He believed the answer was to be found in the qualities he admired in the American democracy: traditions of local self-government and habits of free association, which also encouraged voluntary association. Nothing so impressed de Tocqueville about America as the fondness American citizens had for banding together to address problems of common...