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06463_Field_TCUM T28.txt
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monarchy. And many have held that the American Presidency
has become very much more personal and monarchical than
any European monarch ever could be.
De Tocqueville’s contrast between England and America is
clearly based on the fact of typography and of print culture
creating uniformity and continuity. England, he says, has
rejected this principle and clung to the dynamic or oral
common-law tradition. Hence the discontinuity and
unpredictable quality of English culture. The grammar of print
cannot help to construe the message of oral and nonwritten
culture and institutions. The English aristocracy was properly
classified as barbarian by Matthew Arnold because its power
and status had nothing to do with literacy or with the cultural
forms of typography. Said the Duke of Gloucester to Edward
Gibbon upon the publication of his Decline and Fall : “Another