Mass Society and Mass Culture Theory

Story

“The era of crowds”: in 1895 a physician proclaims a new sovereign

Paris, 1895. Gustave Le Bon, a writer trained as a physician who had worked on everything from the components of tobacco smoke to atomic energy, opens Psychologie des foules (The Psychology of Crowds) with a grand sentence: old beliefs are shaking, old authorities are falling, and one power is left standing, the power of crowds. The title of the introduction is, in fact, “the era of crowds”.

He says the fear has two sources: on one side the collapse of religious, political and social beliefs, on the other the brand-new conditions of life created by science and industry. The result, in his words, is a period of “transition and anarchy”.

Now come to the surprising part of the book. Le Bon despises the crowd, but he does not make the media its master; he says the opposite: the press used to steer public opinion, now it is merely a reflection of the opinions of crowds and, because of competition, has to follow its readers.

Keep this in mind: what we call “mass society” is not one fear but a bag of fears that contradict each other. In Le Bon the danger is a flood rising from below; in some other writers it is a flock herded from above. In this lesson we open the bag.

Story

Tocqueville did not see a crowd in America, he saw a silent majority

1831–32: the French magistrate Alexis de Tocqueville travels through America for nine months. The first volume of the book he writes on his return, De la démocratie en Amérique, appears in 1835 and the second in 1840.

What he fears, unlike Le Bon, is not a crowd pouring into the streets. In the first volume he describes what he calls the “tyranny of the majority”: once the majority has made up its mind, discussion ends, and friends and opponents alike assent in “a submissive silence”. Tocqueville writes that he knows no country with so little true independence of mind and freedom of discussion as America. The pressure comes not from laws but from the opinion around you.

In the second volume the picture changes. Everyone is becoming alike, and everyone is withdrawing into a small world of his own. Tocqueville uses a new word, “individualism”: a person cuts himself off from the mass, draws apart with family and friends, and leaves the rest of society to itself. Above these isolated people rises an “immense and tutelary” power: not harsh but attentive and mild, a power that keeps people in perpetual childhood instead of preparing them for adulthood.

So one author carries two fears: a tyrannical majority and estranged individuals. If “a submissive silence” sounds familiar, you will meet it again in the lesson The Spiral of Silence, in the spiral of silence.

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Who is who, and in which year? Six names, three generations

What costs students most marks in exams is not the theories themselves but the mixing up of years. The cast of this lesson also comes from different countries and different politics; watch the years.

• Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), French. De la démocratie en Amérique: volume 1 in 1835, volume 2 in 1840. The tyranny of the majority, individualism. Alexis de Tocqueville
• Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904), French judge and sociologist. Les lois de l’imitation (1890), L’opinion et la foule (1901): imitation, crowd and public. Gabriel Tarde
• Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931), French. Psychologie des foules (1895). Gustave Le Bon
• José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955), Spanish philosopher. La rebelión de las masas: newspaper articles in 1929, book in 1930. José Ortega y Gasset
• Karl Mannheim (1893–1947), born in Budapest; in Britain after 1933. Mensch und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter des Umbaus (1935; English 1940). Karl Mannheim
• William Kornhauser (1925–2004), American. The Politics of Mass Society (1959). William Kornhauser

On the opposing team play Lazarsfeld and his colleagues: The People’s Choice (1944) and Personal Influence (1955). Paul Lazarsfeld Classical sociologists such as Tönnies, Durkheim, Simmel and Weber stand in the background of this lesson; you will meet them in the lesson Roots of Social Thought.

Story

Tarde: “The psychology of crowds has been written; now comes the psychology of the public”

May 1901. Gabriel Tarde signs the preface of L’opinion et la foule; the title of the first chapter is “The public and the crowd”. Tarde begins with a complaint: writers stick the word “crowd” on every kind of gathering and confuse the public with the crowd. This confusion must end, he says. Even where people speak of the “public” of a theatre, he says, what is really meant is a crowd.

He draws the distinction like this. A crowd is born where bodies are together; in his view it is somewhat animal, since it is a bundle of psychic contagions spread by physical contact. The psychology written so far belongs to this kind. A public is a “purely spiritual” collectivity: people who are physically separated and whose bond is entirely mental. Tarde says that since the invention of printing this new kind has kept growing; the psychology of crowds has been done, he says, and it remains to write that of the public.

His evidence is in his own book: I know regions of France, he says, where nobody has ever seen a Jew; hostility to Jews flourishes there anyway, because people read newspapers that write in that vein. A painful example, but what it shows is clear: a newspaper can produce a public, and its prejudices, without any contact.

And a famous sentence from his first book: “Society is imitation and imitation is a kind of somnambulism” (Les lois de l’imitation, 1890, in the English translation).

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The core of the theory: isolated people, accessible elites

A riddle: if you remove the intermediaries between a politician and the public (associations, trade unions, neighbourhood organisations), communication gets easier, doesn’t it? According to Kornhauser that very ease is the danger. Mass-society theory is not the theory of one author; it is the common name of similar fears, but William Kornhauser gave this family a tidy formula, and in textbooks you will mostly see him as the core.

The formula runs both ways:

• Elites are open to mass pressure. Ordinary people can reach elites without intermediaries and press them directly through votes, reactions and popularity.
• Masses are open to mobilisation by elites. People listen to the direct appeals of distant elites because no strong ties hold them to their immediate surroundings.

The logic of Kornhauser’s own sentence in his entry is this: the more accessible elites are to mass pressure, the more readily the masses can be mobilised by elites.

There is a missing link in the middle: the intermediate groups such as the local community, associations, the neighbourhood, religious and ethnic communities and trade unions. The theory says that as this layer thins, the two ends touch each other bare. The media are the carrier of this contact: mass arenas are run from the centre and through the mass media, since there is no other way to show the whole population the same thing at the same time.

In short, the core claim is: if intermediate groups weaken, the media and elites talk directly to the individual, and the individual becomes open to steering. Is the claim true? The following cards test it.

Myth check

Two strands: fear from above, fear from below

What people assume. Mass-society theory is an elitist, conservative fear that despises ordinary people.

What the record says. The same word (“mass”) carries two opposite worries. Kornhauser separates them as the aristocratic and the democratic criticism.

• The aristocratic (critical) strand, nineteenth century. The fear: that the entry of ordinary people into politics and culture will pull standards down. Kornhauser ties this strand to Catholic thinkers defending the old order (Joseph de Maistre, Bonald), then to writers such as Burckhardt and Nietzsche, and counts Ortega as the author of a highly popular version of the same view. Hamilton too names Le Bon (“from a different perspective”) among the leading nineteenth-century names of this family.
• The democratic strand, twentieth century. The fear turns the other way: totalitarian movements mobilise isolated people. Kornhauser puts Lederer, Mannheim, Fromm, Neumann, Arendt and himself in this group; what is defended is no longer elite values but democratic values.
• The left variant. Hamilton distinguishes right, neutral and left versions. On the left the rulers are skilful: they control the media, making news ideological and entertainment diverting; Gramsci, Marcuse of the Frankfurt School and C. Wright Mills are named in this line.

The trap: naming varies by source (aristocratic–democratic or right–left). Do not go by names; look at what the theory fears: on the right the threat is a flood from below, in the democratic and left strands it is a flock steered from above.

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A small glossary: seven words for this lesson

In this lesson a single word does three different jobs in three authors: “mass”. Read the glossary with that in mind.

• Crowd / mass: in Le Bon, people who act together and acquire a shared “crowd mind”; in Ortega, a mentality; in Kornhauser, an aggregate not divided into groups. See the deep card for details. crowd psychology
• Public: in Tarde, a community that is physically separate but mentally connected. public versus crowd
• Atomisation: individuals cut off from intermediate ties and isolated from one another. atomisation
• Intermediate groups: family, neighbourhood, association, trade union and the like, the layer between the individual and the elite.
• Tyranny of the majority: the majority silencing independent thought and discussion on a question. tyranny of the majority
• Fear of mass culture: the worry that culture will become shallow as it is shaped by numbers and the average. fear of mass culture
• Mass society: the model that gathers all this into one framework; the function of the media is a separate concept. mass society mass media

A note on terms: in Turkish “kitle” is used both for crowd and for mass. Le Bon’s book is known in Turkish sources as “Kitleler Psikolojisi” or “Kitlelerin Psikolojisi”. For Tarde’s public we found no established Turkish equivalent; this lesson says “kamu” (public) and explains it at first mention.

Lab

Mini lab: crowd or public?

Tarde’s criterion comes down to two questions: are bodies side by side, and what makes the bond, contact or mental connection? Classify the scenes below yourself first, then compare with the note. (All of them are imaginary scenes.)

1. At a derby match forty thousand people in the stands rise to their feet at once.
2. All over the country, people who have never seen one another read the same columnist.
3. A thousand people marching side by side in the street at a demonstration.
4. A messaging group of forty classmates who live in different cities.
5. Millions of people watching the evening news.

Note. 1 and 3 are crowds: bodies together and feelings spreading by contact. 2 is a public: no contact, and the columnist makes the bond. 5 is close to a public too, but Tarde knew neither radio nor television; we are stretching his criterion. 4 is the hardest: the bond is both personal and mental, and the bodies are apart; even Tarde’s criterion is not enough on its own. That is why phrases like “viral crowd” are scientifically blurred: an online community is neither quite a crowd nor quite a public.

Lesson to take away: Le Bon’s contagion model was built for the crowd. The public needs a separate explanation, and that is exactly what Tarde asked for.

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Assumptions: five invisible supports of the theory

If you want to test a theory, first find what it does not say. Mass-society theory looks convincing on paper because it does not say its assumptions out loud. We have drawn them out for you (from the framework in Kornhauser’s 1968 summary entry):

1. Scale erodes community. National markets, national organisations and electorates push local community into the background. Kornhauser adds a nuance: not merely because the population is large, but because the scale of activities is large.
2. Eroded ties mean atomisation. When ethnic, religious and class communities dissolve, the person is left on his own.
3. The atomised person can be steered. Someone with no intermediary ties is open to direct appeals.
4. Without intermediaries, media and elites speak directly. In the mass arena everyone is offered the same standardised options.
5. Culture is pulled to the average. Numbers become the measure of success: votes, sales, audience. This is the root of the fear of mass culture; the debate itself is in the lesson The Mass Culture and Popular Culture Debates.

The good thing about the theory is that all five of these assumptions can be tested. The bad thing is the same: when tested, some of them, especially the second, are in trouble. We will see this in the later sections.

Step by step

Le Bon’s crowd machine: three causes, one descent

Le Bon’s claim is that people who come together acquire not the average of their individual traits but brand-new traits. How? He names three causes.

1. Numbers: a feeling of invincible power, and anonymity. The member of a crowd feels power from numbers alone. Because the crowd is anonymous, the sense of responsibility also disappears; the person gives way to impulses he would restrain if alone.
2. Contagion. In a crowd every feeling and act is contagious; a person will sacrifice even his personal interest to the collective one. Le Bon counts this among phenomena of a hypnotic order.
3. Suggestibility (the most important). The person loses his conscious personality and acts out the idea offered to him, like someone who has been hypnotised. For Le Bon contagion is in fact an effect of this.
4. The result: a descent on a ladder. “A man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation”: by the mere fact of being part of an organised crowd. Cultivated when alone, he becomes in the crowd a “barbarian”, a creature acting by instinct.
5. The catch: this is not only true of “the common people”. Le Bon writes that what accumulates in a crowd is stupidity, not intelligence; the mental inferiority covers even “picked assemblies” (juries, parliaments).

This machine has a quiet part too: Le Bon ties the shared character of the crowd to inherited “racial” traits. That side cannot be defended today. Details are in the deep card.

Step by step

Kornhauser’s chain: six links from scale to mobilisation

You can read Kornhauser’s framework in six steps.

1. Large-scale activities. National markets, organisations and electorates push local community, ethnic and religious communities and class communities into the background.
2. Intermediate groups weaken. Between member and organisation there remains an impersonal, unmediated relationship; Kornhauser calls this a “mass organisation”.
3. Mass arenas arise. Fields such as the national market and the electorate are run from the centre, through the mass media, because this is the way to show the whole population the same thing at the same time.
4. Participation becomes choice. People choose among standardised options offered by the media. The measure of success is numbers: votes, sales, audience.
5. Accessible elite, available mass. Leaders are open to mass pressure but also manipulate it; people too are ready for the direct appeals of distant elites.
6. Mass movements. People cut off from communal ties but not yet incorporated into the new order (new migrants, new workers, the young and mobile) are especially inclined towards movements.

But Kornhauser adds a warning: mass conditions alone do not produce totalitarianism; other conditions are also needed. So the chain is not a fate but a map of risk.

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Who does the media serve? One fear, five roles

“What do the media do, according to mass-society theory?” has no single answer. The writers who belong to the theory assigned five different roles to the media:

• Mirror (Le Bon). The press reflects the opinions of the crowd and follows it so as not to lose its readers.
• Maker (Tarde). The newspaper binds physically dispersed people together mentally and creates a public.
• Remedy (Tocqueville). As people become strangers to one another, the newspaper is the one instrument that can drop “the same thought into a thousand minds at the same moment”, and it gathers dispersed people for common action. Tocqueville writes that the evil newspapers cause is much smaller than the evil they cure.
• Arena manager (Kornhauser). The media run the mass arenas by offering the whole population the same standardised options at the same time.
• Instrument of the rulers (left variant). According to Hamilton, in this version the rulers control the media; news is ideological, entertainment diverts, advertising manufactures artificial needs and the audience is “narcotised”.

As you see, in Le Bon the media trail after the crowd, in Kornhauser they manage it, and in Tocqueville they are the cure for isolation. A student who writes “mass-society theory sees the media like this” in a single sentence has answered the question by half.

Lab

Lab: test Le Bon against Bristol 1980

2 April 1980, the St Pauls district of Bristol. Around 3.30 in the afternoon plain-clothes police raid the Black and White Cafe; the cafe, which lost its licence in 1979, is under investigation for illegal drinking and drugs. Children on their way home from a nearby school that has broken up for Easter see the raid, the news spreads fast, people gather, and towards evening the police are forced to withdraw from the district.

The social psychologist Stephen Reicher reconstructs the event from police and fire-service reports, TV and radio recordings, newspapers, photographs and interviews. Let us put Le Bon’s predictions to these records:

• Prediction: an anonymous crowd attacks anything. In the record the attack is directed at the police and police vehicles (according to the official report 21 police vehicles were damaged and eight burned). In Reicher’s count, the only people other than police who were deliberately attacked were photographers, from whom people feared film reaching the police. In addition ten civilians were injured and five private vehicles damaged; Reicher attributes the injuries to crossfire between police and crowd, and the vehicle damage partly to cars being taken for police cars.
• Prediction: every behaviour spreads. Throwing bricks at a police car was “everyone’s” business. Those who stoned a private car, however, were told off and stopped.
• Prediction: loss of consciousness, no limits. Once the police were driven out, nobody followed them beyond the boundary of the district; the crowd opened a way for traffic and directed it.

Reicher’s own reservation: the data are strong hints, not “proof”; and the paper studies only the period before the police withdrew, not the looting that came afterwards. One event does not kill a theory, but here Le Bon’s prediction does not hold.

Story

Erie County, 1940: voters looked to their neighbours, not the media

The 1940 election campaign. Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet select six hundred people from Erie County, Ohio, and interview them again every month for seven months; the publisher’s description presents it as the first systematic effort to follow voters across a whole presidential campaign.

What would mass-society theory have predicted? An isolated voter, defenceless against radio and newspaper. The finding was this: newspapers, radio and campaign advertising had not had a profound effect on people’s voting habits; personal contacts and word of mouth mattered more; the media reached a small but crucial group, who passed things on to the others.

Then Decatur, Illinois. Personal Influence (1955) tests the same idea on public affairs, fashion, the cinema and shopping. The publisher’s description says that the book shows the surprising relevance of primary groups to the flow of mass communication. In 1957 Elihu Katz wrote that the hypothesis had been largely corroborated and refined in several studies.

Even Kornhauser recorded this criticism in his entry of 1968: primary-group mediation of mass communications was shown to prevail over completely atomised audiences. For details see the lessons The Voting Studies and Limited Effects and The Two-Step Flow and Opinion Leaders.

Myth check

What people assume: “Modern people are lonely atoms”

What people assume. Urbanisation and big organisations tore people from family, neighbourhood and community ties; what remained were lonely, steerable individuals.

What the record says. Kornhauser’s own entry admits that postwar research found primary relations abundant in the factory, the army and other allegedly impersonal organisations, and that kinship and neighbourhood ties persisted in cities. Richard Hamilton’s criticism is harsher: in his account most migration is collective and chain-like (people move with, or after, relatives and friends) and short-distance; cities grow not only through migration but also by annexing surrounding areas, which does not disturb ties; and the assumption that the “lonely” migrant stays lonely for life is an incomplete narrative. Hamilton argues that nearly all the main claims of the theory contradict the evidence.

The defence. Kornhauser has also given his reply: mass-society theorists have said not that primary groups have disappeared but that, as they are isolated from the rest of society, they lose their function as sources of meaning and support for the individual.

A balanced reading. According to Gordon Marshall’s dictionary the term has fallen out of fashion in sociology because of its vagueness and value-laden character; even so, there are theorists who study large-scale societies lacking traditional ties. Read Hamilton’s verdict as a critic’s strong word, together with Kornhauser’s defence.

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Report card: what did it see, what did it miss?

What it saw.

• It asked about the importance of intermediate institutions (associations, trade unions, neighbourhoods, communities) for democracy. With Kornhauser’s emphasis, the real value of this outlook lies less in particular propositions than in its concern for the quality of culture and social institutions.
• It raised the question of large scale and a media arena run from the centre. Marshall writes that theorists such as Kumar, Lasch, Berger and Bellah still study the relationships of such societies.

What it missed.

• The atomisation claim got into trouble with the evidence (previous card).
• The picture of “the crowd as inferior” did not hold in Bristol, and Reicher reads it as a tradition written with a class eye.
• The inherited “racial spirit” is part of the theory in Le Bon; it cannot be defended today.
• One-directional “more and more” predictions resist testing; Hamilton also criticises the theory’s constant “more and more” structure.
• Suspicion of nostalgia. Marshall writes that these worries were largely brushed aside as “elitist nostalgia” until the 1950s; that is, the theory was accused of remembering the lost community too fondly.

So the questions the theory asked (ties, scale, the media arena) live on, while the answers it gave largely lost when tested.

Step by step

How did this picture feed the fear of “powerful effects”? Four steps

Mass society was not a research finding but a picture: the audience left alone, without intermediaries, open to mobilisation. You can read how this picture was tied to the fear of “powerful effects” in four steps:

1. The picture. Intermediate groups have dissolved; the audience is atomised.
2. The inference. A medium that reaches an atomised audience directly must be powerful. This step is our inference, not a sentence of the theorists themselves.
3. The textbook narrative. When the interwar worry about propaganda joined this inference, textbooks told of a view of effects summed up as the “hypodermic needle” or “magic bullet”. Jefferson Pooley (2006) shows that the fifteen-page summary in Katz and Lazarsfeld’s Personal Influence fixed in textbooks the narrative “first the media were thought powerful, then research showed them limited”. Sproule (1989) and Lubken (2008) argue that the “magic bullet” portrait is a straw man.
4. The counter-move. The Lazarsfeld line answered: “the audience is woven into groups, so the effect is mediated and limited”.

So both halves of the story (“everyone believed in the needle” and “Lazarsfeld refuted it”) are disputed. For details see the lessons The Hypodermic Needle and Magic Bullet Model and The Two-Step Flow and Opinion Leaders and the concept powerful effects assumption.

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The one-step flow: mass society, this time in front of the screen

The idea that came out of Lazarsfeld and his colleagues’ findings in the 1940s was the “two-step flow”: the message goes from the media to opinion leaders and from them to the others. But what about today?

W. Lance Bennett and Jarol Manheim (2006) put forward a claim of a shift for the United States: public communication has shifted from a two-step flow, in which messages pass from the mass media through a process of social mediation, to a “one-step flow” in which messages are targeted directly at individuals. They regard this as a reflection of changes in technology and in the relations between individual and society. According to the authors, opinion leaders no longer “lead”, since they are more likely to reinforce latent opinions than to reframe them; and fragmented media feed individualisation through shrinking audiences, programming driven by demographics and targeted political advertising.

This reading offers a curious return to the mass-society picture. In the 1940s groups refuted the claim that “the audience is atomised”; now technology reaches the individual by going round the groups. The difference: while Kornhauser derives atomisation from the dissolution of social ties, here the mechanism is targeting technology. That is our inference.

A limit: the authors speak of the United States and present this as an interpretation; take the article, which we read at the abstract level, not as a final verdict but as a thesis under discussion.

Myth check

What people assume: “The algorithm is locking us into a filter bubble”

What people assume. The personalised web shuts everyone up inside his own opinions; people never see another view. The idea is set out in Eli Pariser’s book The Filter Bubble of 2011; the publisher’s description says that in December 2009 Google began customising search results for all users.

What the record says. Later studies showed a more mixed picture:

• Bakshy, Messing and Adamic (2015), among 10.1 million US Facebook users, found that individuals’ own choices limited their exposure to differing views more than the algorithmic ranking did.
• Flaxman, Goel and Rao (2016), in the browsing histories of 50,000 US users, found that social networks and search engines increased both ideological distance and exposure to content from the other side, with effects that were relatively modest.
• Zuiderveen Borgesius and colleagues (2016) concluded in their review that, at the time, there was little empirical evidence to justify worry about filter bubbles.
• Bail and colleagues (2018) showed in a field experiment that exposure to opposing views can increase polarisation: Republicans became substantially more conservative after following a liberal bot; the shift among Democrats was small and not statistically significant.

Interpretation (ours). The filter bubble can be read as a new version of mass society: the “isolated individual” is now imprisoned by the algorithm. The evidence partly supports this but is not conclusive; all of it is US-centred and concerns the platforms of a particular period.

Lab

Mini lab: test a viral wave of anger with three questions

Imagine that on a neighbourhood forum a security-camera clip spreads and hundreds of people target a shopkeeper with angry messages. Crowd psychology immediately says “contagion and loss of reason”; mass-society theory says “atomised people are being manipulated”. Ask three questions instead:

1. Are the participants really isolated? Look through the line of Lazarsfeld and Katz: who sees whose messages, whose friend shares whose message? Are intermediate groups at work?
2. Does contagion spread equally to everyone? In the data of Brady and colleagues (2017) each moral-emotional word raises diffusion by about 20 percent, but this effect is stronger within groups and weaker between them. So the contagion looks group-bound.
3. Is this a crowd or a public? By Tarde’s criterion the bodies are apart and the bond is mental; the word “crowd” may then be misleading. Are the options the platform offers the same for everyone (Kornhauser’s “standardised options”)?

These three questions will not give you an answer; but they will stop you jumping to the wrong one. This is a training exercise: without the data of a real event you cannot reach a conclusion.

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A trace from Turkey: the Ottoman intellectuals who read Le Bon

Le Bon also passed through the world of Turkish reading. According to Ferihan Polat and Ayşegül Durmuş (2015), Le Bon’s ideas fed a distrust of the people and an elitist attitude in a section of the Westernist intellectuals of the Young Turk period; in this frame the article names Ahmed Rıza, Mizancı Murad and Abdullah Cevdet.

The article’s focus is Abdullah Cevdet: the authors report, relying on Hanioğlu, that he translated many of Le Bon’s works into Turkish, and that according to Hilmi Ziya Ülken the first Western thinker who came to mind at the time when Abdullah Cevdet was mentioned was Le Bon. We took this list of translations from a single source and could not confirm it with a second Turkish one, so we do not go into its details.

Mustafa Enes Aktürkoğlu (2021) reports that Le Bon died on 13 December 1931 and that Abdullah Cevdet devoted a piece to him in the issue of the journal İçtihat dated 15 January 1932; the article also says that Le Bon’s ideas were adopted by Ottoman intellectuals.

This short trace tells us two things. First, the fear of “crowd and elite” was not a purely European import; Ottoman intellectuals read it and used it in their own context. Second, we should not exaggerate an author’s influence: these are articles about the reading and adoption of Le Bon in one circle of intellectuals; they do not prove that he determined the politics of the period. For the continuation of the mass-culture debate in Turkey see the lesson The Mass Culture and Popular Culture Debates.

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This is how exams ask it

Frequent patterns

• “Which author speaks of an ‘era of crowds’ and explains the crowd through suggestion, contagion and anonymity?” → Le Bon (Psychologie des foules, 1895).
• “To whom does the concept of the tyranny of the majority belong?” → Tocqueville (De la démocratie en Amérique, 1835 and 1840).
• “The public/crowd distinction, imitation?” → Tarde.
• “The mass-man, the ‘mass’ as not a class” → Ortega y Gasset (1930).
• “Accessibility of elites, availability of the masses for mobilisation” → Kornhauser (1959).
• “The two strands” → the aristocratic and the democratic criticism (Kornhauser).
• “The research that argued against the mass-society view” → Lazarsfeld and colleagues: the voter study and personal influence.

Tempting wrong answers

• Taking Ortega’s mass for the working class: the mass-man can come from any class.
• Mixing up Tarde and Le Bon: imitation and the public are Tarde; contagion, suggestion and the crowd mind are Le Bon.
• Counting Le Bon as the owner of the “hypodermic needle model”: that label was attached later and does not belong to Le Bon (The Hypodermic Needle and Magic Bullet Model).
• Summarising Kornhauser as “mass society arises when the population is crowded”: the criterion is the scale of activities and the weakening of intermediate groups.
• Looking for a single fear in Tocqueville: a tyrannical majority and a soft, tutelary power.

Alternative names (as used in Turkish)

• Le Bon’s book: “Kitleler Psikolojisi”, “Kitlelerin Psikolojisi” (The Psychology of Crowds).
• Ortega’s book: “Kitlelerin Ayaklanması” (İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları), “Kitlelerin İsyanı”, “Kütlelerin İsyanı” (in bookshop listings) and, in one article, “Kitlelerin Yükselişi” (all renderings of The Revolt of the Masses).
• Tocqueville’s concept: “çoğunluğun tiranlığı”, “çoğunluğun zorbalığı” (both: tyranny of the majority).

Exam questions are written to general patterns; whichever source you study from, match the name and date in the question with your own source.

Summary

Summary card

• Not one theory but a family of fears: mass society gathers into two strands: fear that elite values will collapse (aristocratic) and fear that atomised people will be mobilised (democratic, left).
• The core (Kornhauser, 1959): if intermediate groups weaken, elites become open to mass pressure and masses to elite mobilisation.
• The role of the media is not single: mirror (Le Bon), maker (Tarde), remedy (Tocqueville), arena manager (Kornhauser), instrument of the rulers (left variant).
• Crowd ≠ public: Le Bon stresses contagion, Tarde stresses connection.
• The evidence: in Bristol 1980 the crowd was limited and targeted; in Erie County and Decatur people took the media through their surroundings.
• The criticism: the atomisation claim got into trouble with the evidence, but the questions about ties and scale live on.
• Today: the debates on the one-step flow and the filter bubble are new versions of old questions; the evidence is mixed.
• Watch the word “mass”: according to Williams there are no masses, only ways of seeing people as masses.