This chapter examines the reception of expellees in West Germany. I show that expellees were perceived as foreigners, despite sharing ethnicity and language with the locals. I then document expellees’ exclusion from local voluntary associations and the formation of new associations based on migration status and region of origin. I conclude by analyzing contributions to public goods provision in Bavarian municipalities. I show that the more expellees a given community received, the lower the rates at which it taxed the locals’ property and business.

Nonelites made their own music and were also consumers of music performed by professionals in various settings. These included not only the private parties of the lower classes but public banquets at festivals and recreation in drink shops and the like, as well as the banquets held by voluntary associations to which nonelites belonged. The recreations of the lower classes took on larger public and political significance at festivals and their associated public banquets. Wealthy people and rulers used public entertainments to curry favor with the public and promote a public image of themselves. Rulers did the same. These public entertainments included banquets in theaters and amphitheaters where food and wine were served, sometimes in a fashion that amounted to a kind of mass dinner theater. This custom began with snacks and wine being provided to theatergoers in fifth-century Athens and seems to have mushroomed into something grander by the late Hellenistic era. The style was adopted by certain emperors, and one imperial format was a public banquet held in an arena where musical entertainments were provided and the gladiatorial matches and beast fights and hunts were also accompanied by music.

Chapter 5 identifies the participation and roles of individuals in civil society. We argue that concentrating only on individuals would be more taxing and less meaningful than a multimodal analysis of interactions between individuals and associations in collective action fields. Individuals’ overlapping memberships allow organizations to monitor their environment, allocate resources, communicate, ally with others, and define the boundaries of their actions. At the same time, organizations enable individuals to meet similar others, strengthen their collective identity, share their skills and experiences, deal with threats, explore opportunities, and develop individual identities. We demonstrate how to use data on individual participation from the European Values Survey to conduct a relational, comparative analysis of the structure of political communities. Although multiple membership data are often employed to classify organizational types, here we investigate the structure and roles of the actors involved using projection and structurally equivalent blockmodeling. We examine networks of individuals and organizations in Italy, the UK, and Germany in 1990 and 2008 for a rich, comparative design that reveals the different profiles of political communities in those three countries.

In Chapter 10, we interrogate the relation between scale and professionalism, which we define as meaning that important tasks are delegated through a rational division of labor to individuals with extensive training and experience, who are recruited and promoted in a meritocratic fashion, who view their job as a full-time career, and whose positions are amply staffed and remunerated. We argue that scale fosters professionalism because it produces higher (human) capital, and because it amplifies the complexity of governance. Subsequently, we examine the relationship empirically by sequentially looking at legislatures, bureaucracies, the education of public officials, the salary of public officials, and the number of voluntary associations. We find that increases in scale are associated with a growth of legislative and bureaucratic professionalism and capacity, higher levels of education and higher salaries of public officials, and a greater number of voluntary associations. Extant studies as well as our own analyses therefore suggest that scale is positively correlated with professionalism. These results are summarized in a short conclusion.

Liberalism’s substitute for civic friendship is the Association: citizens associate to pursue their interests, according to modern theory. Yet empirical evidence shows we also join for motives of honor, pride, and the wish to cooperate. While economic models of politics (“formal models”) fail to capture these mixed motives, our modern ideal of altruism further debilitates associations by considering them low, selfish pressure groups. Associations have thus fallen on hard times, and the individual often faces off against the Leviathan state, with no mediating association. Recent attempts to improve on formal models—projects to reinvigorate the morality and rationality of cooperation, such as those of Jane Mansbridge and Richard Tuck—could benefit from Tocqueville’s comparable attempt to create an ideology of “rightly understood” interest, whereby Americans could disguise their morality as rational when it in fact relied on vestigial altruism (“disinterested and unreflective sparks that are natural to man”). Going back behind Tocqueville to excavate civic friendship would at least bring theorists, if not citizens, back into a more realistic picture of what is actually going on.

Aristotle valued small associations more than today’s liberals: he considered villages, fraternal organizations and guilds to be civic friendships in their own right. He criticized utopian theories such as Plato’s Republic for quixotically attempting to destroy associations. In liberal democracies, associations formed to tackle causes reproduce some of the advantages of the small polis: in such associations, each member acts in view of his fellow citizens, and thus is influenced by the moral suasion of the group. Each perceives the influence he exercises, seeing the local impact of his power and taking ownership of incremental social change. Rethinking associations as civic friendships runs up against the problem of involuntary associations with their “solidarity and hostility.” Michael Walzer would correct liberalism’s deracinating tendencies by incentivizing us to remain in our involuntary identity groups. But his plan to channel government benefits through such groups would compromise the groups he means to help. To break the stranglehold of the bad associations—lobbies—to clear space for good associations, Congressional reforms are needed.