Mass Age In Agony

Extract

The philosophy of the Enlightenment and the rise of capitalistic industrialism ushered in the age of the masses. The one represents a social philosophy which undermined the traditional relations between state and society, and in addition, the well-established forms of precapitalistic society; the other brought in the machine and large-scale enterprises both leading to the formation of masses in our modern society. A sort of a natural process seemed to be in operation here; suddenly, called forth by nobody and wanted by nobody, the masses appeared. They grew with breath-taking rapidity. No sooner did they make their appearance than the first danger signals were hoisted. Primarily they came from representatives of the declining order, protagonists of the ancient regime such as, to mention a few, de Maistre, Donoso Cortes, Alexis de Tocqueville. Adam Mueller and Gentz among the romanticists sounded the same warnings. Somewhat later they were joined by such diverse representatives of bourgeois humanism as Wilhelm Bensen, J. Burckhardt, Spengler, and Sombart. The new, masses are visualized here as the forces undermining all cultural and religious institutions and values. At last even the very beneficiaries themselves of the new order became concerned about the social consequences of the machine-age. Thomas R. Malthus and John Stuart Mill expressed this concern very strongly; however, they saw in the masses not so much a necessary concomitant of an individualisticmachine- age and of materialistic progress as the effect of an irrational behavior of the “poor” with regard to marriage and child-bearing.