Cultural populism and egalitarian democracy

Abstract

In the late eighteenth century there began a great debate on popular culture that extends down to our own time but that has yet to find its historian.1 Literary writers started to face directly the question of the cultural and political meaning of the growing market for printed goods for they were becoming more dependent on a relatively wide middle-class and partly artisan audience (first present in eighteenth-century England), and were experiencing the erosion of the privately endowed aristocratic patronage system. Leo Lowenthal showed thirty years ago how important this was in the origin of the modern debate on "mass culture."2 The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw also, however, several developments that began to polarize attitudes amongst the intellectual elite toward the traditional artisan and peasant culture that still predominated in Europe. Three developments, in particular, are worth citing here. First, widening educational and cultural differences between upper social strata and the common people after the mideighteenth century, coupled with the growing threat of rebellious rural and urban crowds to aristocratic politics in the age of the "democratic revolution," brought on sustained conservative alarm at the "vile multitudes."3 Second, the initial rise of an ascetically-minded business class and the beginnings of "progressive" economic liberalism, especially in western Europe, saw attacks on a traditional popular culture seen as unfit for the making of a modern civilization requiring prudent, industrious values.4 Third, the spread of a populist romanticism aimed against "enlightened" gentility brought many intellectuals to praise peasant and artisan "folk" against courtly or bourgeois culture in the years between the German Sturm and Drang (the 1770s) and the Revolutions of 1848 1849.