ABSTRACT
Pragmatism reflects a society that has no time to remember and meditate.
Max Horkheimer
The prevalence of a social-scientific vision of the world with its own positivistic claims on truth and reality remained a major issue following the introduction of communication research by Lazarsfeld and others. However, there were alternative visions of communication and society, although marginal at the time, which had always existed outside the social science establishment. They were expressed in the context of literature and sociology through a holistic approach to the study of society by those working with an understanding of culture as a dramaturgy of symbolic expression, and by others through a critique of mass culture which emerged from Marxism and, more specifically, from the contribution of Critical Theory to American social theory. Both traditions shared an abiding belief in the importance of exposing the destructive power of progress and the deprivation of the individual caught in an increasingly barbaric world, and working toward a more humane society. Thus, a critique of culture evolved from the writings of Kenneth Burke and sociologists like Hugh Dalziel Duncan, or the sociological work of David Riesman or C. Wright Mills next to intensely theoretical contributions by Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse and Lowenthal, in particular. Their ideas emerged during a period of political and social upheaval in the United States which provided the context for a significant critique of modern society.
