ABSTRACT
Although populist sentiment in contemporary cultural thought ranges across otherwise divergent positions, these positions share a commonly negative response to the elitist critique of mass culture, which has ideological origins that stretch back to the ancient Greek patrician’s fear of the plebeian ‘crowd’ (Giner 1976). In the modern era, the mass culture critique was theorised and spread widely as educated common sense. The most conservative versions, dating from the nineteenth century, stressed an absolute division between inferior majorities and refined minorities. For example, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had this to say:
In every healthy society there are three types which condition each other and gravitate differently physiologically; each has its own hygiene, its own field of work, its own sense of perfection and mastery. Nature, not Manu, distinguishes the pre-eminently spiritual ones, those who are pre-eminently strong in muscle and temperament, and those, the third type, who excel neither in one respect nor the other, the mediocre ones-the last as the great majority, the first as the elite.
