1
2
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/links.html
3
See the discussion in Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, ch.1. To a
certain extent, mass society theory rests on the contradictions intrinsic to the notion of the liberal individual. Liberalism’s
conception of the individual detaches him from the underpinning social institutions upon whose existence he depends. On
one hand, there is the supposed (elite) independent individual who has the internalized moral character, will, and reason to
forge an independent path. This image is contrasted with a projected idea of the mass of the population, which supposedly
lacks the will and discipline to resist external suggestions and internal desires.
Talcott Parson traces out the collapse of this theoretical synthesis and its evolution into Social Darwinism in his account of
the Utilitarian conception of action in his The Structure of Social Action vol. 1, ch.3. Utilitarian social theory dispensed with
its notions of liberal society -- of a society composed of rational, self -interested individuals -- as social groups (that is, the
mass,) considered lacking essential rationality and discipline– women, non-whites, Southern European immigrants – entered
into the public sphere. See Schudson.
4
As befits the word, spectacle, the concept draws implicitly on a metaphor of distanced passive visual watching of an
overwhelming show. Certainly since Tertullian’s denunciation of the “spectacle” in ancient Roman times, where the
emperors deliberately provided a mix of bread and circuses for ht crucial roman masses to stabilize their rule, the spectacle
have referred to organized visual leisure-time depictions, intended to offer vicarious satisfactions for those who make up the
populace and thus are content to sign over all decision-making power to the ruler. Tertullian, De spectaculis. Online at:
http://www.tertullian.org/lfc/LFC10-13_de_spectaculis.htm
5
On pseudo-history see Vivian Sobchack, “Introduction,” in V. Sobchack (ed.) The Persistence of History: Cinema,
Television and the Modern Event (1995).
6
Alvin Gouldner, The Two Marxisms: http://www2.pfeiffer.edu/~lridener/DSS/Marx/2marxtoc.htm .
7
Marx, 1844 Manuscripts; German Ideology. And see Agnes Heller, Marx’s Theory of Value, ch. 2.
8
Marx, German Ideology, in Robert Tucker (ed.) 160. As Charles Taylor suggests, Marx was drawing on 19th-century
romantic notions of the expressive unified personality.
9
Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, (International Publishers, 1974) 423; Marx, “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,”
appendix to Capital (Penguin, 1976) sec. 4.2.
10
Thesis 20.
11
Axel Honneth, Reification: A Recognition-Theoretical View (2005) 100-101.
http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/Honneth_2006.pdf
12
Lukacs draws on Weber to develop this perspective. See Max Weber, “Religious Rejections of the World and Their
Direction,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (Oxford University Press,, 1958).
13
On art see Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
14
For a powerful discussion of he spectacle of the president see Bruce Miroff., "Monopolizing the Public Space: The
President as a Problem for Democratic Politics," in Thomas E. Cronin (ed.) Rethinking the Presidency (Boston: Little,
Brown and Co., 1982.)
15
Which becomes the context for an essential loss of common sense or realisms, says Hannah Arendt.
16
Cf. Orville Lee, “Culture and Democratic Theory: Toward a Theory of Symbolic Democracy,” Constellations 5 (4)
(1998)
433–55.
17
See the useful discussion in Paul Breines, The Young Lukacs and the Origins of Western Marxism (NY: Seabury Press,
1979) 117.
18
Michael Schudson, “The New Validation of Popular Culture: Sense and Sentimentality in Academia,” Critical Studies in
Mass Communication, 4 (1987) 51-68.
Convention