Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08957_Field_TCGG T722.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 956b | 16 lines

definite intellectual movement throughout western and central
Europe. . . . It was surely not aristocratic, and, though paying
lip-service to democracy, it tended to be middle-class.” It is his
next sentences that indicate the “fixed point of view” for the
state, on one hand, and the individual, on the other: “It
stressed the absolute sovereignty of the national state, but
sought to limit the implications of this principle by stressing
individual liberties—political, economic, and religious—within
each national state.”

     The inevitable condition of fixed viewpoints arising from
the visual stress in nationalism also led, writes Hayes (p. 178),
to the principle that: “Because the national state does not
belong to the citizens of any particular generation, it must not
be revolutionized.” This principle is made especially manifest in
the written-visual fixity of the American Constitution, whereas