Mass Society: History of the Concept

Abstract

The history of the notion and theory of mass society is explored, from its ancient roots in Greek and Roman political thought about ‘the many’ and ‘the few,’ until modern times. Theories about the plebs, demagoguery and revolutionary crowds in thinkers such as Plato, Cicero and Hobbes are shown to bear upon later conceptions. The modern idea of a leveled, homogenous society developed by Tocqueville in the nineteenth century, combined with the fears about ‘the masses’ expressed both by ‘crowd psychologists’ (Le Bon, Freud) and conservative writers, are seen as the precursors of the contemporary mass society conception, as it appears in its mature form in Ortega’s Revolt of the Masses (who introduced the notion of ‘mass man’) and in the works of Mannheim, who introduced the expression ‘mass society.’ The diverse ramifications of the mass society conception into the contemporary theories of ‘mass culture,’ ‘mass politics,’ the ‘homogenization’ of society, ‘mass comsumption,’ and the ‘depersonalization’ of modern human beings (Riesman’s notion of the ‘outer-directed personality,’ Marcuse’s ‘one-dimensional man’) and other, closely-related, interpretations are also analyzed. The widespread persistence of the mass society conception in contemporary thought, often subsumed into other interpretations of modernity, is explored.