ABSTRACT
Today, Robert Staughton Lynd would probably be described as an anthropologist of complex organizations. Certainly his work defies easy labeling. Not since Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America have the people had such a careful analysis of the daily life of America, middle America in this case. The Robert Staughton Lynd and Helen Lynd provide a documentary accounting of the life of a town at two selected periods: 1890 and 1924, rather than attempting to do a detailed study of the history of the intervening years. Such cross-sectional analysis provides a sensitive appreciation of the cultural tension between past and present generations. The Jeffersonian emphasis on democratic life is precisely the most outrageous hypothesis contained in Knowledge for What? Helen Lynd understood England in the 1880s as being involved with problems of social organization compatible with democratic individualism, a problem also true of the United States fifty years later.
