Mass Society

1st Edition - January 1, 1976

Author: Salvador Giner

eBook ISBN:

9 7 8 - 1 - 4 8 3 2 - 6 1 1 8 - 8

Mass Society deals with the total outlook of human including modern politics culture, social inequality, community life, and problems. The book reviews the history of democracy… Read more

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Mass Society deals with the total outlook of human including modern politics culture, social inequality, community life, and problems. The book reviews the history of democracy and discontent. The text analyzes the mob rule, the disenchantment of progress, and the history of democracy. Modern sociological theory explains the opposition of two extreme societal models to describe the historical dynamics of mankind. The book is an attempt to explain that a mass society outlook exists and has some inner coherence and distinctive quality. The author argues that such outlook or theory is a prominent feature in the cultural imagination of man, and that modern secular society cannot be understood without such theory. The author then proceeds to identify majority with mass, and the identification of human with mass human. This identification will lead to a community vision, though the author argues the growth of a mass interpretation of society has a negative effect on the liberal theory of the individual. The text can be interesting for political science majors, sociologists, psychologists, and economists.

Introduction

Acknowledgments

Chapter I The One, The Few and the Many

1. Democracy and Its Discontents

2. 'The Only Law Will be Force

3. The Many and the Proper Constitution

4. The Best and the 'Vulgar Herd of Nominal Freemen

5. History and the Revolt of the Masses

6. Order and Plebs

7. The Dregs of Romulus

8. 'Panem et Circenses'

Notes

Chapter II Enter the Mob

1. An Interlude

2. Individual Excellence and Popular Order

3. 'Thieving, Murderous Hordes'

4. Population and the Mob

5. Prejudice and Reaction

Notes

Chapter III The Disenchantment of Progress

1. Optimism Revisited

2. Freedom, Equality and the Rise of Collective Mediocrity

3. The Jacobin Spirit

4. The Plebeian Spirit

5. The Soul of the Multitude

6. The Decline and Fall of Civil Society

Notes

Chapter IV The Social Structure of Irrationality

1. Unreason and Modernity

2. The Universal Leveling

3. Mass Man

4. Invertebrate Society

5. The Dehumanization of Culture

6. The Dislocations of History

7. The Mass Society

8. The Loss of Selfhood

Notes

Chapter V Sociology and the Dissolution of the Tribe

1. Social Polarity and History

2. Social Polarity and Sociology

3. Community and Modernity

4. Sociology and the Mass Society Prophecy

5. An Excursus: Societies, Open and Closed

Notes

Chapter VI The Wane of Community

1. The Strain of Social Density

2. Urban Dislocation and Industrial Servitude

3. The Withering Away of Community

Notes

Chapter VII The Structure of Mass Society

1. Massification

2. The Classless Class

3. The Managerial Hierarchy

Notes

Chapter VIII The Politics of Mass Society

1. The Mass, the Mob and the Decomposition of Society

2. Totalitarian Myths and the Quest for Submission

3. The Vulnerable Society

4. Organization and Terror

5. Democracy and the Politics of Unreason

6. Anti-Utopia

Notes

Chapter IX The Culture of Mass Society

1. From The Revolt to the Rape of the Masses

2. Mass Culture

3. 'An Interminable and Ferocious Debate'

Notes

Chapter X Mass Man

1. The Perversion of Individualism

2. Alienation

3. Mass Man

4. Common Man Revisited

Notes

Chapter XI A Critique (i)

1. Criticism, Past and Present

2. Aristocratic Fears, Dangerous Classes

3. Sociological Underpinnings: The Misinterpretation of Modern Social Theory

4. The Myth of Massification

5. Power and the Assertions of Freedom

6. Modern Culture and the People

7. Man and Society in the Age of Modernity

Notes

Chapter XII A Critique (ii)

1. A Question of Names

2. The Poverty of Radical Pessimism

3. The Failed Rescue

4. The Mass Society Ideology

5. The Legacy of a Theory: Mass Society and Modernity

Notes

Bibliography

Author Index

Subject Index