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Associations with a professional staff but no members (nonmembership advocacy organizations, or NMAOs) are the subject of lively debate. Many argue that their proliferation has allowed an expansion of advocacy without an accompanying growth in civic engagement. This article asks if there has been significant recent growth of NMAOs and if those organizations have displaced membership advocacy organizations (MAOs). The authors find no evidence for a proportional increase of NMAOs since the 1960s. Further, among all organizations in three populations—peace, women's issues, and human rights—NMAOs have not displaced MAOs. In particular, the authors find that MAO density shapes NMAO founding, as membership groups provide a base for professional advocacy. These findings challenge the notion that U.S. civic life has undergone a systemic transformation away from organizational forms that promote civic engagement.

Though not a pure anarchist, Proudhon was the forerunner of anarchism. Though not a militant trade unionist, he was the foreunner of syndicalism. Human relationships, he held, must be built on free individual initiative and mutual justice and respect-impossible in the present social order based on exploitation. The new social order demands special interests groups, which, on the economic side, would faciliate the direct exchange of goods and eliminate most of the credit system, and, on the political side, would supply the minimum degree of federal sovereignty necessary for social balance. Proudhon's life was busy and dramatic; his writings were prolific and influential out of all proportion to their coherence. His influence was felt in the Paris Commune; in the establishment of mutualistic banks in Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany; in the anarchism of Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Herzen; in the social theory of DeGreef; and in the present-day syndicalist movement, which looks to Proudhon as its prophet...

At the basis of Proudhon's philosophy is his notion of justice, founded upon respect for human dignity. The modern economic system runs counter to any possible human dignity, since wage-earners have no security or freedom. Proudhon demands both. The "Associationists" propose only the security without the freedom. Proudhon finds the principles of his system illustrated in nature, in which he sees balance, equilibrium. In social life, contract between the individual and the group and between one group and another will protect liberty. Proudhon calls himself an anarchist, but his real emphasis is upon group functions. Sovereignty was to be, not dissipated, but subdivided: its chief carriers to be the commune and the work group. These then were to be federated. Proudhon's wish for equivalent treatment of all humanity breaks down in his program for woman. She is too inferior to permit of anything but perpetual tutelage: chastity and submission are her natural virtues. In the case of the moral and intellectual ...