American Journey
Green, Martin
Books: FOLLOWING DeTOCQUEVILLE AMERICAN JOURNEY TRAVELING WITH TOCQUEVILLE IN SEARCH OF DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA Richard Reeves Simon and Schuster, $14.95, 352 pp. Martin Green THIS is a book I...
...He quotes Christopher Lasch's description of therapy as an anti-religion, and more than once refers to the culture of narcissism...
...Indeed, only men who know the law...
...He quotes some authority that America is expanding at the rate of ten billion words a minute...
...And he reports that when he asked why American values have so changed, he was often told "Freud...
...But against this dragon Richard Reeves is our St...
...Of course, even after a second reading, one will have only a mental map of where to find things in it-and only a quarter of its contents will be signaled on your map...
...They were content to let conservatives try to deal with those issues, because they had no policy of their own-at least none they could engage in without fearing they were betraying themselves...
...Referring to life on one street of...
...That hesitancy and self-reversal seem to me to throw some light on the last presidential election results...
...He quotes many blacks who predict imminent repression and violence...
...De Tocqueville called American lawyers, as compared with French, a sacred caste, the priests of democracy...
...He talks to Nixon, as de Tocqueville talked to John Quincy Adams...
...In fact, Reeves comes close to laying the basic blame for America's problems at the door of Freudianisrn...
...and intellectual meaning intellectual history, for by testing de Tocqueville's theory of democracy against contemporary fact...
...He has investigated America today by following the journey that de Tocqueville made 150 years ago, asking the same or equivalent questions of the equivalent people...
...Reading Reeves, you will catch up with all that you have missed-or at least with quite as much as you can cope with...
...George...
...Martin Green THIS is a book I recommend to everyone, but especially to those like myself who habitually shirk their civic duty to read the newspaper and watch the current affairs program on TV...
...And to the proliferation of law suits: between 1970 and 1977 civil cases filed in federal district courts grew by forty-nine percent...
...But the effect of all this patterning is to reinforce the argument, to make it into a book, to make it memorable...
...The book has therefore, besides facts, a strong element of intellectual pattern...
...Reeves concludes, can be full citizens of this country...
...He concludes-though, with some signs of indecision-by saying that in America democracy "does work...
...He begins in Newport, Rhode Island, on the same day of the year as de Tocqueville began, and ends in Washington, D.C...
...Time and again he was told that only second- or third-rate young Americans go into politics, while the very brightest of all go into law...
...At the same time, everyone complains of too much regulation and legalism, and nearly everyone engages in certain kinds of illegality with no moral qualms...
...On the other hand, he knows a great deal more about America - partly because he makes use of those ten billion words a minute of ours...
...As for what Reeves talks about, the topics of his analysis of America today, I will mention just three...
...Reeves also recurs often to the debauching of American morals, the decay of the work ethic, and the replacement of religion by therapy...
...Reeves is continuing and reinforcing a tradition -a tradition of sociological thought as well as of American studies...
...Our ethic is now built around duty to oneself "in glaring contrast to the traditional ethic of obligation to others...
...and as we know, words aren' t the half of it- what about figures, what about images...
...That is a grave indictment, of democracy as well as of America, and there is much in the book to make it gloomy reading...
...and he dines with Ed Koch, because de Tocqueville dined with the then mayor of New York...
...pattern here meaning an assertion "of form independent of, though relevant to, the items reported...
...And it is indeed striking how often the same questions prove to be still the ones worth asking...
...He reduces those words and their meanings to manageable proportions...
...He is concerned about legality -and illegality -and legalism...
...But Reeves does not let the whole add up to an indictment...
...between what his informants said about other people and what they did in their own lives...
...Well, we've all heard that before, and it's a let-down after so much clear-thinking and honest writing earlier...
...Nowadays we see our culture as a mushroom cloud, expanding centrifugally, with some of the same apocalyptic effect as that other mushroom cloud...
...Finally, Reeves has a lot to say, again gloomy, but this time incipiently radical in tendency rather than conservative, about the conditions of black people in America...
...He points to the extraordinary number of lawyers in America: in 1978 there were 465,000, compared with 12,000 in Japan, and there were 115,000 more in law school...
...But that is vastly more than most compilators can boast, and constitutes a good argument for the cultivation of form-for aesthetics...
...He points to the explosion of class action law since the 1960s, and the way in which law is displacing legislation, and politics...
...indeed, how often the answers are the same- or at least look similar under the author's skillful manipulation...
...Liberals are deeply dismayed by the decay of social morality, and by the proliferation of administrative detail and legalism, but they feel that action to curb those would be conservative action...
...Memory and the Muses are intimately related...
...His last sentence runs, "The glory and frustration of American democracy is that greatness is defined by each American - and that's the way it was meant to be...
...This is something they told de Tocqueville too...
...And I mean, among other things, that one remembers what is in the book because of the form...
...between ideas and answers then and now...
...This is not a single pattern: Reeves makes us see the parallels (and reversals) between conditions then and now: between this journey and that one...
...Detroit's black ghetto, Reeves says, "If democracy moves forward by millions of individual decisions, then Americans, silently, democratically, by unspoken consensus, made the decision that this is the way it would be in our time...
...At this level, Reeves is no match for de Tocqueville...
...But he backs away from doing that, at the last moment, no doubt because of the illiberal company in which he is about to put himself...
...And he has worked out a way to combine those resources of modern reporting with de Tocqueville's analysis, and so to revive a classic art of thought and set it to work again on our own experience...
Vol. 109 • June 1982 • No. 12
