Nationalism insists on equal rights among individuals and 
among nations alike.

*     If rigorous centralism is a main feature of literacy and 
print, no less so is the eager assertion of individual rights. De 
Tocqueville notes in The European Revolution  (p. 103): “In 
1788 and 1789 all the pamphlets published even those by the 
future revolutionaries themselves, are opposed to 
centralization and in favor of local rule.” He adds a little later 
(pp. 112­13) a note that indicates that, like Harold Innis, he 
had the habit not of presenting a picture of events but of 
meditating on their inner causes: “What is so extraordinary in 
the French Revolution is not so much the procedures it 
employed as the ideas it conceived. The new and astonishing 
thing is that so many nations should arrive at a stage where 
such procedures could be so efficiently employed and such