ABSTRACT
The theory of mass society has two major intellectual sources, one in the nineteenth century reaction to the revolutionary changes in European society, and the other in the twentieth century reaction to the rise of totalitarianism, especially in Russia and Germany. During the nineteenth century, aristocratic critics of bourgeois society spun a rhetoric of pessimism concerning the value-standards men live by in an age of increasing materialism and equalitarianism. From the democratic viewpoint, the threat posed by mass society is less how elites may be protected from the masses and more how non-elites may be shielded from domination by elites. There are three major terms implied in the democratic criticism of mass society: growing atomization (loss of community); widespread readiness to embrace new ideologies (quest for community); totalitarianism (total domination by pseudo-community). Therefore, mass society is a system in which there is high availability of a population for mobilization by elites.
