@article{THESIS,
      recid = {6117},
      author = {Beacom, Nathan},
      title = {The American Mind Goes Inside: The Loss of American  Citizen Learning Institutions and the Individualization of  Public Thinking},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {M.A.},
      address = {2023-06},
      number = {THESIS},
      abstract = {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.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/6117},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.6117},
}