So, historically, did the culture itself invite the not-so-ideal suburbs to come about?
Suburbia was anticipated by Tocqueville’s second volume of Democracy in America in which he writes about the culture of individualism. Tocqueville is careful to distinguish between individualism and selfishness. Selfishness is a vice endemic to human nature, but individualism represents a nascent cultural ideology. Tocqueville writes that in an individualist society, human beings imagine they can live their lives entirely unto themselves, not particularly mindful of generations past or generations to come–it’s as if in 1835 he’s describing the post-1945 American suburb. He concludes that the problem with individualism is that in the end it becomes selfishness, which ultimately undermines both democracy and human happiness. But Tocqueville also writes hopefully of how in America the family, churches, and above all free associations combat the American tendency toward individualism–and of how these institutions are necessary because they promote the moral and intellectual virtues essenti
