America during the nineteenth century. was a society of island communities. Weak communication severely restricted the interaction among these islands and dispersed the power to form opinion and enact public policy. Education, both formal and informal, inhibited specialization and discouraged the accumulation of knowledge. The heart of American democracy was local autonomy. A century after France had developed a reasonably efficient, centralized public administration, Americans could not even conceive of a managerial government. Almost all of a community's affairs were still arranged informally.

     My purpose is to describe the breakdown of this society and the emergence of a new system. The health of the nineteenth-century community depended upon two closely related conditions: its ability to manage the lives of its members, and the belief among its members that the community had such powers. Already by the I870'S the autonomy of the community was badly eroded. The illusion of authority, however, endured. Innumerable townsmen continued to assume that they could harness the forces of the world to the destiny of their community. That confidence, the system's final foundation, largely disappeared during the eighties and nineties in the course of a dramatic struggle to defend the independence of the community.
Although no replacement stood at hand, the outlines of an alternative system rather quickly took shape early in the twentieth century.