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Understanding McLuhan
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06462_Field_TCUM T27.txt
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1996-04-10
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explained how it was the printed word that, achieving cultural
saturation in the eighteenth century, had homogenized the
French nation. Frenchmen were the same kind of people from
north to south. The typographic principles of uniformity,
continuity, and lineality had overlaid the complexities of ancient
feudal and oral society. The Revolution was carried out by the
new literati and lawyers.
In England, however, such was the power of the ancient
oral traditions of common law, backed by the medieval
institution of Parliament, that no uniformity or continuity of
the new visual print culture could take complete hold. The
result was that the most important event in English history has
never taken place; namely, the English Revolution on the lines of
the French Revolution. The American Revolution had no
medieval legal institutions to discard or to root out, apart from