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08259_Field_TCGG T24.txt
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1996-04-10
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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: