Tocqueville’s classic description of mass society

1. The modern image of mass society begins with the French aristrocrat Alexis de Tocqueville who toured the United States of America in the 1830s in search of the ‘secret of democracy’

2. Tocqueville was struck by the similarity of ideas and values among the people and speculated that such a society might fall victim to a mass or herd mentality which he called ‘the tyranny of the majority’.

3. Tocqueville’s classic description of mass society An innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavouring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is a stranger to the fate of all the rest. His children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow-citizens, he is close to them but he sees them not; he touches them be he feels them not.

4. Tocqueville’s classic work Democracy in America (1835-40) identifies within democracies a tension between equality and liberty which cannot easily be reconciled. • ‘Democracy tends to undermine hierarchy and discourages the formation of intermediate groupings between the individual and society and thereby promotes tendencies towards individualism and centralisation which, if unchecked, may result in an authoritarian state.’

5. 19th century sociologists shared many of de Tocqueville’s concerns about the emerging culture of industrial societies. Emile Durkheim diagnosed ‘anomie in the new order’ and Max Weber focused on the ‘dead hand of bureaucracy’ while Ferdinand Tonnies reflected unfavourably on the crowded, urban, mass societies then emerging in Europe.

6. Anomie means an absence, breakdown, confusion, or conflict in the norms of a society. The term anomia is linked to the adjective anomos meaning ‘without law’. • In Durkheim’s writings the concept appears prominently in The Division of Labour in Society and Suicide.

7. In ‘Division of Labour in Society’ the term emerges through society’s transition from ‘mechanical’ to ‘organic’ solidarity. • ‘Increasing division of labour brings about social integration through organic solidarity, but where economic change is too fast for the growth of moral regulation to keep pace with increasing differentiation and specialisation then an abnormal or anomic pathological division of labour occurs.’

8. In a society exhibiting mechanical solidarity, its cohesion and integration comes from the homogeneity of individuals - people feel connected through similar work, educational and religious training, and lifestyle. Mechanical solidarity normally operates in ‘traditional’ and ‘small scale’ societies. • Organic solidarity comes from the interdependence that arises from specialization of work and the complementarities between people - a development which occurs in ‘modern’ and ‘industrial’ societies. Durkheim introduced the terms ‘mechanical’ and ‘organic solidarity’ as part of his theory of the development of societies in The Division of Labour in Society (1893).

9. The argument is further developed in his discussion of Suicide where anomie is one of the four causes of suicide identified. • Anomic suicide occurs increasingly in organic societies, notably at times of economic depression or boom, when there is a lessening of economic regulation. In such periods people are less closely locked into their society, so their basic desires may become limitless and confused.

10. The concept of mechanical and organic solidarity is often contrasted with Karl Marx’s idea of ‘alienation’. • Defined as the ‘estrangement of individuals from one another, or from a specific situation or process’, the concept of alienation is central to Marxist sociology. • ‘All forms of production result in ‘objectification’, by which people manufacture goods which embody their creative talents yet come to stand apart from their creators. Alienation thus, is the distorted form that humanity’s objectification of its species-being takes under capitalism.’

11. Max Weber, together with Durkheim, is often regarded the founder of modern sociology • The neo-Kantian idea that human society was not a matter of chance but of ‘probabilities’, and what made social science possible was the fact that human beings act rationally for at least a large part of the time, is at the basis of Weber’s work.

12. Weber developed a four-fold classification of social action (action directed towards significant others and to which we attach a subjective meaning) - • Traditional action undertaken because it has always been so performed • Affectual action based on or driven by emotion • Value-rational action directed towards ultimate values; and • End-rational or instrumental action. Only the last two of these fall within the scope of rational action.

13. Weber saw the development of modern societies as a process of increasing rationalisation in which the world loses its mystery. The growth of large scale modern bureaucracy is a major part of that process and one of Weber’s criticisms of socialism was that it would simply hasten this ‘disenchantment’ of life.

14. Ferdinand Tonnies (1855-1936) is famous for his distinction between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (association).

15. The distinction refers to the different types of relationships supposedly characteristic of small-scale and large-scale societies respectively. In the former, where the population is largely immobile, status is ascribed and the family and church play important roles in sustaining a clearly defined set of beliefs, emotional and cooperative relationships flourish. The village and small community are therefore characterised by gemeinshaftlish or community relationships. These relationships however dissolve into contractual and impersonal relationships as the division of labour grows more complex, so that large-scale organisations and cities express gesellschaftilich associational social forms.

16. These ideas were largely ignored or dismissed as elitist nostalgia until the 1950s, when sociologists and political scientists began to write about the immediate past history of totalitarianism in Europe and the Soviet Union.

17. In The Politics of Mass Society (1959), William Kornhauser argued that populations cut adrift from stable communities, and having uniform and fluid values, would be vulnerable to the appeals of totalitarian mass movements.

18. ‘The structure of mass society consists in direct elite-non-elite relations by virtue of the paucity of intermediate groups. The lack of intermediate groups leaves institutional elites poorly related to society, and directly accessible to penetration by mass movements. It also leaves non-elites poorly related to society, and directly available for mobilisation by mass-oriented elites … Mass society is characterised by mass men in elites as well as in non-elites, and therefore by the psychological vulnerability of both elites and non-elites to mass appeals.’

19. Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, and others of the Frankfurt School focused their attention on the narrowly ideological nature of ‘mass culture’ and a whole critical literature developed around this perspective. They were the founders of what is known as the ‘critical theory’.

20. The first meaning of the term critical theory was that defined by Max Horkheimer in his 1937 essay Traditional and Critical Theory. Critical theory is social theory oriented toward ‘critiquing and changing society as a whole’, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only to ‘understanding or explaining it’. • Its core concepts are: (1) That critical social theory should be directed at the totality of society in its historical specificity (i.e. how it came to be configured at a specific point in time), and (2) That Critical Theory should improve understanding of society by integrating all the major social sciences, including economics, sociology, history, political science, anthropology, and psychology.

21. Theodore Adorno saw the culture industry as an arena in which critical tendencies or potentialities were eliminated. • He argued that the culture industry, which produced and circulated cultural commodities through the mass media, manipulated the population. • Popular culture was identified as a reason why people become passive; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture made people docile and content, no matter how terrible their economic circumstances. The differences among cultural goods make them appear different, but they are in fact just variations on the same theme. Adorno conceptualised this phenomenon as pseudo-individualization and the always-the-same. He saw this mass-produced culture as a danger to the more difficult high arts.

22. Herbert Marcuse in One Dimensional Man(1964) developed this line of argument to its fullest extent, asserting the absolute hegemony of mass culture and the impossibility of social change

23. One-Dimensional Man offers a wide-ranging critique of both contemporary capitalism and the Soviet model of communism, documenting the parallel rise of new forms of social repression (both public and personal) in both these societies as well as the decline of revolutionary potential in the West. • He argued that "advanced industrial society" created false needs, which integrated individuals into the existing system of production and consumption via mass media, advertising, industrial management, and contemporary modes of thought. This results in a ‘one-dimensional’ universe of thought and behaviour in which aptitude and ability for critical thought and oppositional behaviour withers away.

24. The principle themes of the theory of mass society are still important. In fact the recent work of Robert Putnam – Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community – on social capital has once again raised this issue, returning to the ideas of Tocqueville.

25. Putnam argues that the United States of America has undergone an unprecedented collapse in civic, social, associational, and political life (these he collectively calls social capital) since the 1960s, with serious negative consequences. Though he measured this decline in data of many varieties, his most striking point was that virtually every traditional civic, social and fraternal organization -- typified by bowling leagues -- had undergone a massive decline in membership while the number of people bowling increased drastically.

26. Putnam makes a distinction between two kinds of social capital: bonding capital and bridging capital. • Bonding occurs when you are socializing with people who are like you: same age, same race, same religion, and so on. But in order to create peaceful societies in a diverse multi-ethnic country, one needs to have a second kind of social capital: bridging. • Bridging is what you do when you make friends with people who are not like you, like supporters from another football team. Putnam argues that those two kinds of social capital, bonding and bridging, do strengthen each other. Consequently, with the decline of the bonding capital mentioned above inevitably comes the decline of the bridging capital leading to greater ethnic tensions.

27. Mass media, mass culture and mass society The relation of the mass media to contemporary popular culture is commonly conceived in terms of dissemination of news and information from the elite to the mass. • During the 18th century it was the utmost chic for the aristocrats of the French Court to assume the guise of shepherds and peasants in their restive outings. • Akbar and Birbal are said to often disguise themselves as common people to find out what was happening in the kingdom. • Rama had his agents moving around his kingdom and it was one such agent who reported to him the comment passed by the washerman about Sita.