ABSTRACT
What role do popular culture and media play in the rise of a new class to power? This was a question that preoccupied the Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci, writing in the revolutionary era of the 1920s. He turned for his answer to earlier periods of bourgeois ascendancy in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In both eras, Gramsci saw that modern journalism was “the most prominent and dynamic part” of the “ideological front” of the bourgeoisie.3 In order for members of the new class to see themselves as such and then advance their political aspirations,
they depended upon a journalistic vanguard capable of articulating their particular cultural sensibility and world-view, and of projecting this as the average, natural “common sense” of the age. Of all the journalistic genres that expressed this common sense, none was more effective than the “moralizing review”—or what today we would call the lifestyle magazine. It was here that the status quo was mocked in favor of the “modern way of life,” and persuasively so-with wit, detachment, and a “sincere interest in average opinion.”4
