Volume 34, Number 4 · March 12, 1987
A Visit to Mr. America
By Leo Marx
The American Newness: Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson
by Irving Howe
Harvard University Press, 99 pp., $12.50
Probably no impression Tocqueville had during his 1831–1832 tour of the United States was more provocative—or dismaying—than the prospect of a society in which, as he puts it, 'every man seeks for his opinions within himself,' and turns 'all his feelings…towards himself alone.' But he takes pains, in Democracy in America, to distinguish this 'vice' from ordinary selfishness or égoïsme, a passionate and exaggerated love of self that is not characteristic of any particular form of society. Far from being a psychological abnormality, the unusual self-centeredness of Americans is of democratic origin: a calm, mature, socially authorized feeling, and so novel that it has given birth, he writes, to 'a novel expression.'
Review, 3553 words
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