The right of Americans to form associations for their own self-chosen (legal) purposes and govern them as they see fit is deeply ingrained in American tradition and recognized in the constitutional right to assembly. Unfortunately, courts increasingly have recognized it only as a derivative right growing from the individual right to free speech. Courts have been stretching and reconfiguring this free speech right for over a century. They have turned it into a right of "expression," treating each individual as an autonomous being that creates its own meaning through emotive actions from flag burning to sexual activity. In this schema there is no association proper. There is only "expressive association," which exists purely as a means by which individuals may choose to express their own, individual emotions and opinions.

Lost in this hyper-individualist understanding of association are the essential elements of any decent life: community and purpose. In an important act of analytic recovery, Sheahan provides an exhaustive review of the work of sociologist Robert Nisbet. Well known to conservative readers for his Quest for Community, Nisbet wrote extensively on the nature and functions of associations. Sheahan systematically lays out Nisbet's understanding of associations' roles in shielding persons and their communities from overreaching governments and, especially, in forming human personalities.

On the political level, Nisbet notes that "major groups which fall in between the individual and the sovereign state become intermediating influences between citizen and sovereign. They are at once buffers against too arbitrary a political power and reinforcements to the individual's conception of himself and his own power." This crucial function, noted already by Alexis de Tocqueville in his classic study of "administrative decentralization" and its role in protecting democratic liberty, is in fact a byproduct of associations' natural pursuit of their own goals. Families, religious organizations, and book clubs all have reasons for existing that are made concrete in their activities, and also in internal norms. Like associations' actions, their customs and standards of behavior form around common recognition of stated values and internal authority. The resulting obedience is limited, provisional, and subject to a right to exit if the member no longer shares the association's values. Still, internal rules and discipline are essential to the very existence of any meaningful association.

Taken together, these elements of purposive association make up important parts of each person's life; they may be said to make up that life itself. As Sheahan puts it, "Associations in a democracy are not a means to self-government; they are self-government. They are not one option for the ordering of human life; they are the order of human life."

To survive, associations must have real purpose and must be accorded their own integrity and internal governance. Unfortunately, the rise of the commanding, sovereign state, with its claim to be the master community of "its" society, has undermined both these requirements for any genuine community. Simplistic notions of national sovereignty helped rulers centralize power at the expense of more natural, local associations in the name of social cohesion. State actors came to see themselves as entitled to order and re-order these associations to fit with their own designs and notions of justice. The doctrine of sovereignty, put forward by the English Parliament, was rejected outright at the American Revolution. But the vision of the state as a kind of national community responsible for the health, well-being, and egalitarian virtue of its constituent members has infected public discourse over time. It has, among other things, led to the conviction that groups cannot themselves have rights. (This despite the fact that the development of legally recognized rights in the Anglo-American tradition literally began with battles over the rights of groups including the Church as well as various municipalities and classes.) It lay behind programs of transformation such as Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, with its goal of liberating the individual "from the enslaving forces of his environment."