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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 33
into a debased form of High Culture and thus becoming an instrument of
political domination. (MacDonald, 1957, p. 60)

THE MASS SOCIETY OUTLOOK AND MEDIA
RESEARCH
It can be seen from the above that the theory of mass society constructs its
critique of modern society by positing a linked series of historical
contrasts between past and present. Once upon a time, it is argued, social
relationships were communal and organic in nature. People knew where they
were. Their place within the order of things was clearly fixed and legitimated by
a universally binding system of beliefs and values. The distinction between élites
and masses—or, in this case, the rustic folk—was clearly constructed and culture
was clearly stratified, the folk growing wise in their own way rather than cutting
their cultural teeth on the inferior, handed-down versions of the high culture of
society’s élites. Since then, the development of industry, in breaking up
traditional social relationships, has thrown men and women into isolation and
self-reliance, the promise of freedom having turned into the living nightmare of
anomie and alienation. Democracy has turned into its opposite as new forms of
tyranny, playing on the fears and isolation of a social atomized population, have
established themselves. And culture, in being spread, has degenerated into moral
and aesthetic barbarism.
The above sketch is, of course, a caricature. And deliberately so. For it has
been largely in such highly simplified and condensed forms that the mass society
critique has enjoyed a widespread currency outside the narrow enclaves of
academia. Daniel Bell, writing in 1960, argued that, Marxism apart, the theory of
mass society was ‘probably the most influential theory in the western world
today’ (Bell, 1960, p. 21). Yet, assessed as a body of theory, the mass society
critique leaves much to be desired. Its key terms, for example, have always been
notoriously imprecise. The masses and the élite have usually been simply
negatively defined as the obverse of one another instead of each being positively
identified in terms of some objective set of social characteristics. Perhaps most
important, however, is the fact that, for all that the theory depends on
establishing a series of historical distinctions and making them work, it has
notably failed to do so. The contrast between the organic community and mass
society clearly depends on a highly romanticized conception of the past, as is
evidenced by the fact that it has proved impossible to state, with any precision,
when the one ended and the other began.
However, even assuming that the concepts of the organic community and
mass society could be given the degree of historical support they require, there
would still remain the problem of actually accounting for the transition between
the two. Here, to cite Daniel Bell once more, the theory of mass society is
crucially flawed in the respect that it ‘affords us no view of the relations of the
parts of the society to each other that would enable us to locate the sources of