Page 46 - Culture Society and the Media

36 THEORIES OF THE MEDIA AND SOCIETY
liberal-pluralist position (see Shils, 1957 and 1962). He did so by arguing that
many of the developments outlined within the mass society position—the
dissolution of non-rational forms of social attachment, the weakening of
traditional ties and obligations, the attenuation of the power of established
hierarchies—tended to augment the democratic process rather than to undermine
it. If, by ‘mass society’, one meant a society in which ‘the masses’ had moved
from the periphery to the centre of social, political and cultural life, then, Shils
declared, he was all for it—provided that the mass was conceived not as a simple
agglomeration but as a pluralist hotch-potch of differing regional, ethnic,
religious and economic primary groupings.
We can see here how, in the work of such sociologists as Shils and Daniel
Bell, the liberal-pluralist tradition of social theory emerged from within the mass
society tradition by means of a criticism of it. This development was not
restricted to the field of media sociology but formed part of a general revision of
the heritage of European social theory undertaken by the younger generation of
American sociologists in the war and immediately post-war years. This, in turn,
was not unrelated to the need, given the war against Nazi Germany and, later, the
tensions of the Cold-War period, to develop a theory that would distinguish the
social structure of western democracies from those of totalitarian political systems
rather than, as the mass society critique tended to, lumping them all together.
The contours of this argument were most formally stated by such political
theorists as Joseph Schumpeter who defined the democratic method as ‘that
institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals
acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for people’s
votes’ (Schumpeter, 1976, p. 269). Basically, this amounted to saying that
democracy, as its critics had contended, was indeed a system of government by
élites but one in which the majority retained the right to determine, periodically,
precisely which élite should govern. The contribution of American sociologists
to this emergency repair job on the liberal-democratic tradition was to furnish a
concept of social structure capable of breathing life into such dry constitutional
bones. If the democratic process worked, they contended, it was because the
wide range and variety of competing interest groups which constituted the
bedrock of the social structure constantly checked and limited one another so as
to prevent any one group from assuming a position of preponderance in relation
to the others. Further, the incorporation of the masses into the political life of the
nation, instead of being viewed negatively, was held to constitute a constraint
which those élites temporarily vested with the responsibility for government
could not afford to ignore.
These theoretical realignments had marked consequences for the way in which
the media were viewed. Once regarded as the villains of mass society, they came
to be viewed as the unsung heroes of liberalism-pluralism triumphant. The media,
it was contended, were far from monolithic. The clash and diversity of the
viewpoints contained within them contributed to the free and open circulation of
ideas, thereby enabling them to play the role of a ‘fourth estate’ through which