SOURCE: "Irving Howe: The Pathos of the Left in the Reagan Era," in his The Pilot and the Passenger: Essays on Literature, Technology and Culture in the United States, Oxford University Press, Inc., 1988, pp. 337-47.

Marx is an American educator and critic. In the following review of The American Newness originally published in 1987 in The New York Times, he critiques Howe's thoughts on Ralph Waldo Emerson's individualist philosophy.

Individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life; but in the long run it attacks and destroys all others and is at length absorbed in downright selfishness.

                          Alexis de Tocqueville

Probably no impression Tocqueville had during his 1831–32 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...