ABSTRACT
Alexis de Tocqueville looked at America in the making. He scrutinized American institutions as they were evolving. This chapter focuses on a relatively peripheral aspect of the differences—on those that relate to the role of the press and the arts. It also focuses on some aspects that Tocqueville predicted correctly, and on others he could not foresee. Tocqueville marvelled at the tight link between newspapers and associations, at the proliferation of both as a necessity caused by the expansion of local and regional governmental agencies, and at the need of these to influence their representatives in the federal government. When Tocqueville compared the American democratic experiment to the French one, he focused on the progress of this society of immigrants. In America the arts are expected to cure the ills of the culture, and to help change a value system that has gone awry.
