In a work now 150 years old, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that ‘in America, not only do communal institutions exist, but there is also a communal spirit which sustains and gives them life’ (Tocqueville 1968: 81). In pointing this out, the theorist of local democracy introduced a distinction which enables one to go beyond a purely administrative view of life of the commune and of its relationship with the State and society. The mere existence of communal institutions, sanctioned and protected by the State, is not sufficient to enable those who are administered to behave as citizens, or to take charge of running the affairs which directly affect all those who live in the commune, in a word ‘to participate’.

In Tocqueville's view, to speak of a ‘communal spirit’ does not mean resorting to mysterious states of the soul, in the sense in which, for example, André Siegfried used to speak of the ‘soul of nations’. As far as he was concerned, communal spirit results from the practical conditions in which the exercise of power is shared and even becomes routinised, so that each citizen may be called upon to perform a function or may possibly be forced to do so: