“Fascinating. . . During wars, natural disasters, economic depressions and previous epidemics, Americans have turned not just to the public sector for aid and guidance but also to a variety of business groups and voluntary organizations—in essence, taking “personal responsibility” for the problems they were facing. This philanthropy-rooted approach, Ms. Clemens argues, has helped Americans offset their ambivalence about active government while forging a sense of shared purpose in crisis.”

The Wall Street Journal

“Clemens is our most important political sociologist, and in Civic Gifts she explodes the myth that civil society stands apart from the state. This book is a magnificent history of the relationship between civic benevolence and the building of American identity, as well as a must-read history for anyone who has ever described the United States, like Tocqueville, as a nation of joiners.”

Rob Reich, author of Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better

“This brilliant, colorful, and profoundly theorized book shows how, bit by bit, a contraption arose that precariously reconciled many contradictory pieces of American civic life, state, and culture: the voluntary association, in its many surprising permutations. Clemens’ masterpiece of social, political, and cultural history reveals how the American state crafted American emotions, and vice versa. Civic Gifts is a book for all political theorists and social historians.”

Nina Eliasoph, author of The Politics of Volunteering

“In a regime like America’s—premised on popular sovereignty but with a vibrant anti-state tradition—state actors became dependent on the collaboration of others and vice versa. In Civic Gifts, Clemens shows how this interpenetration worked to transpose relations of private benevolence into support for both nation- and state-building. Her book is a major achievement in the state-building literature, in the tradition of Weber, Moore, Tilly, and Mann.”

Sidney Tarrow, author of War, States, and Contention

“Clemens impressively details questions about proper roles of, and relationship between, public and private sectors in meeting social challenges through American history. . . . Clemens thoroughly examines how civil society has related to the state, and whether they can stand apart even if they want to do so. . . . Civic Gifts thus necessarily—and knowledgeably and intelligently—considers, in some depth, notions of civic benevolence, philanthropy as gift-giving, and the building of American identity.”

Philanthropy Daily

“Richly textured, nuanced, and engrossing. . . Civic Gifts raises important questions about the relationship among charitable giving, civic identity, participatory democracy, and the state.”

Stanford Social Innovation Review

“Clemens analyzes the relationship between nonprofit organizations and American government and, in the process, forces us to set aside a powerful myth about the philanthropic world: the myth of independence.”

The Chronicle of Philanthropy

"Dr. Clemens’ excellent study helps us understand the visions and practices of voluntary benevolent associations throughout America’s history—and provides a vantage point for assessing the erosion of our feelings of solidarity and common purpose with our fellow citizens."

Law and Liberty

"Clemens is attuned to the complex and often contradictory consequences of partnerships between public institutions and private organizations."

The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

"Elisabeth S. Clemens’ Civic Gifts: Voluntarism and the Making of the American Nation-State is an ambitious retelling of the development of the American state through episodes of historical conflict between 'two different and demonstrably contradictory relational geometries: the form of the gift and the model of liberal citizenship' (p. 266)."

American Journal of Cultural Sociology