and the development of civilization is viewed frankly as a 
multilinear process much can be done toward the 
understanding of the history of Western culture as a 
progressive integration of many separate elements.” (pp. 30­
1)

     A historical “point of view” is a kind of closed system that 
is closely related to typography, and flourishes where the 
unconscious effects of literacy flourish without countervailing 
cultural forces. Alexis de Tocqueville whose literacy was much 
modified by his oral culture, seems to us now to have had a 
kind of clairvoyance concerning the patterns of change in the 
France and America of his time. He did not have a point of view, 
a fixed position from which he filled in a visual perspective of 
events. Rather he sought the operative dynamic in his data: