Modernity and Mass Society

Even though the term modern is generally used to describe the "current and contemporary state of affairs," the intellectual concept of modernity can be described as the emergence of industrialization and thus the emergence of the public sphere. It was solidified with the rise of mass media, such as newspapers, radio, and the emergence of television. The process of modernization has created a public sphere enabling the free trade of opinion. In processes like industrialization and individualization, modern mass society was created with its potential for democracy, but also its susceptibility for political propaganda.

Keywords Community; Gutenberg Galaxy; Individualization; Industrialization; Media; Modernity; Peace of Westphalia; Pre-Modernity; Society; Thirty Years War

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Overview

Even though the term modern is generally used to describe the "current and contemporary state of affairs," the intellectual concept of modernity can be described as the emergence of industrialization and thus the emergence of the public sphere. The economic situation began to change with factories, mass production, and the invention and industrial application of the steam engine as a power source.

The rise of the nation and of republicanism as political forms are a result of both the discourse in this newly emerging public sphere and the decline of the role of religion as a corollary of Enlightenment philosophy and modern science, including the theories of evolution and new cosmic models, which mark the era of modernity. It was solidified with the rise of mass media, such as newspapers, radio, and the emergence of television.

Modernity began in Europe with the period of early modernity to the Thirty Years' War and the establishment of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Both the war itself and the conditions of the Peace dramatically changed the political and social landscape of Europe. It cost the lives of an estimated three to four million people; most died from epidemics that resulted as side-effects from the raging war. The original population at the time was estimated to be seventeen million.

The drain in resources was immense. The kingdoms and fiefdoms of that era had no resources to finance and sustain themselves for such a long period, which was not foreseeable at the beginning of the war. The end of this war necessitated completely new structures of warfare, financing, communication, etc. After the war, social and economic problems had to be dealt with in previously unknown ways.

The Peace of Westphalia built the political prerequisites of Europe until the French Revolution, and some claim that the system affected the shape of Europe until the Nazi-era or even up to the creation of the European Union. In essence, the Peace of Westphalia was the advent of the establishment of international lawmaking.

Origins of the Mass Society

A remarkable development was the invention of the printing press. The Chinese technology of printing was already known in Europe when Johannes Gutenberg made some remarkable changes to the technology, which allowed for the mass production of books. But the process of social acceptance of this technology and its effects took a century or two, which is often the case with any technology having an actual transforming effect on a culture. Several aspects of this transformation are crucial to notice. Among them are the standardization of languages and alphabets and also the standardization of books and authors. It is important to understand that in the Middle Ages the handwritten texts greatly differed, and only after the possibility to mass produce the same text over and over again was it possible to standardize these different versions. With standardization it became possible to think of a person as an author. We think of an author of a book as an authentic person and the book as authentic. But that was impossible before the printing press and the mass production of books. In turn, with the printing press and the author we have the invention of the audience. It is only with the possibility of reaching a large number of people with a written product that the audience of masses is actually created in the mind of a writer as an actual target for his written work. Before that writing had a narrower purpose.

However, this requires another important development. These masses have to learn to read. This skill was not as common as it is today, and the process certainly took its time and correlated with changes in economics, science, and industry.

The Age of Enlightenment

The eighteenth century saw the intellectual movement of the Enlightenment. It is a common misunderstanding to say that the Enlightenment was the emergence of the supremacy of science over religion or the process that unmasked religion as an ideology. Actually, most Enlightenment scholars were very religious and their work was written for an audience that was not a lay audience, but mostly other members of the clergy who made up the majority of the academics of those times. Even the greatest among the Enlightenment authors, Immanuel Kant, wrote about religion, God, and the immortal soul.

What these authors argued in regard to the sciences and the subject matter of the world was only that science should not have to follow religious doctrine; that religion had to respect the results of science when they contradicted the doctrine. In that regard, Kant stated that one "cannot know god with certainty, but only have faith in God." Religion is about faith and not about knowing. Therefore, the faculties of science and of theology must be viewed separately.

Following this rationale, Kant argued for a public use of reason. In what is perhaps the most famous and most widely read of all of his works, his little pamphlet, What is Enlightenment? was perhaps the very first document dealing with the need for communication in modernity and mass society.

Kant argued that enlightenment is not a solitary task, but can only be accomplished by a community of those who dare to use reason and communicate their ideas and insight and discuss them critically. The foundation of reason is its publicity. Publicity is a very modern idea, and it is a fundamental aspect of mass society.

According to Jurgen Habermas (1991), the public sphere actually emerged around the eighteenth century. It began in the salon culture with educated citizens (still in the minority) discussing openly and critically political and philosophical ideas. In this sphere, a space of discourse was created where every private citizen could participate and autonomously argue their opinion. Again, the private citizen was still a very restrictive concept, pertaining only to those who could afford to have an education.

However, the creation of this public sphere was highly important for the further progress of modern society and the prerequisites for mass society and its public discourse in media such as newspapers and later, radio and television.

It is also important to see the dependency of these developments to the process of urbanization. Higher education and science happened in cities, not in the country. Development and wealth was attracted to city life more than ever before. And with debate and ideas came industrial and economic innovation. Before long, industrialism and capitalism took their course and shaped the common picture of modernity as one of industrial labor, individualization, urbanization, and entrepreneurship.

Further Insights

Industrialization, modernization, individualization, urbanization, and capitalism are the classic topics of sociology. It can be argued that sociology is actually the scientific study of these processes, or emerged as a scientific discipline because of them. In the works of Ferdinand Toennies, Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber they represent the central problems these men addressed.

Sociological Voices on Modernity

Toennies, in his seminal Community and Society was concerned with the relationship between society and community and the effects of urbanization, commonly understood as the loss of community. Émile Durkheim studied the evolution of law and ritual in Elementary Forms of Religion, the negative effects of modernity and individualization in The Suicide, and the difference of traditional and modern modes of production in regard to social cohesion in The Division of Labor. Georg Simmel wrote many essays dealing with the effects of modernity and the question of what it means for the human condition. His work is highly philosophical, but at the same time it offers many insights that none of his more empirically or historically oriented colleagues could conceive. His two best-known books, Sociology and The Philosophy of Money are two very dense descriptions of modernity and its most important social processes.

Max Weber's analyses of modernity dealt most intensely with the rise and effects of capitalism. His work on the Protestant Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism is perhaps the most important and most read work of all sociology. No other sociological study has received this much attention both from other scientific disciplines as well as in the general intellectual discourse. Weber's thesis that the ethos of the Calvinist sect and the asceticism of modern capitalism are inextricably linked has been his most famous sociological statement.

“Economy and Society” This work was published posthumously. It was supposed to be somewhat of an encyclopedia of sociology. One of its most important contributions is Weber's theory of political rule. Political authority may be legitimized by a leader's charisma, by tradition, or by bureaucratic legal procedure. The latter is an indicator for modern society. Modern legislation and governance, for Weber, means that civil service administration must be founded in the use of files and fixed legal procedure that does not allow for arbitrary judgment. Public office is a profession that must be learned by those who occupy such office and cannot be an inherited position. Holding public office is also not a position that should enable the creation of personal wealth outside of compensation for the work itself.

In 1937, Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons published a voluminous book titled The Structure of Social Action, which was the result of his ten-year effort introducing the work of European social theory to American science. The book was not a bestseller initially, but its second edition after the Second World War established Parsons as the eminent sociologist for a generation or two and introduced Weber and Durkheim as the leading voices of the study of modernity.

While Parsons was still a young lecturer, the Harvard environment saw the emergence of the human relations movement under the aegis of physiologist Lawrence Henderson and psychologist Elton Mayo. Both had found that in modernizing industry and business, the leaders of capitalism had forgotten to include the industrial laborers’ physiology and psychology as a non-rational factor. Labor and efficiency were considered quantifiable factors by economics and business. In many experiments, the human relations movement members could expose that the efficiency of workers was dependent on the context of their personal lives. In other words, industrialized modernity had forgotten that its people were human beings, and men like Elton Mayo worked toward bringing the humans back in.

Society, as Simmel or David Riesman and others have demonstrated, created mass society as well as the category of the individual. But in between mass society and individualization the real human being becomes estranged from other people and evidently, lonely and depraved. Many of the "diseases of civilized society" such as depression occur, it seems, only under these conditions. The psychiatry of the nineteenth century was a child of these processes, a fact Michel Foucault has studied intensively (2008).

This aspect is crucial even for contemporary sociology and psychology, because the medical reasons for certain psychological maladies must be clearly distinguished from those factors that relate to the social circumstances and promote the severity of a disorder.

Viewpoints

Are We Really Modern?

Science Historian Bruno Latour has argued that it may actually be that we have never been modern. In short, he defines modernity as providing us with a clear demarcation of two opposite realms: the human sphere with its arbitrary rules and the hard material of external nature. However, reality itself constantly proves that this separation is null and void. Not because both spheres are intertwined, but because the separation itself is artificial and useless. Therefore, we have never been modern and mass society itself is just another form of an agglomeration of beings. This interpretation is of course radical and counters sociological literature from Weber to contemporary authors. But while provocative, Latour makes many valid points that cannot be easily explained away by his critics.

Modernity & Mass Social Movement

However, acceptance by the public society of this demarcation has enabled many social movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The hygiene movement and the discourse of psychiatry have been two related and very influential developments that eventually disseminated into the minds of the masses. Hysteria and neuroses were at times more a fashion than actual disorders. Diagnoses could be found in abundance and social failings and personal problems were declared as the result of a psychological state that needed treatment. Between science and charlatanry conceptions of personal and mental hygiene left the discourse of experts and were treated in mass publications by laymen. Concepts of purity and degeneration found their way from biology, industrial psychology, and psychiatry into the discussions of politicians and ordinary people. And eventually these concepts were conflated with racist ideologies and eugenics.

Propaganda

The unfiltered and uneducated use of these conceptions made the crimes of the Nazis possible. In the early twentieth century, mass society existed in the Western world. Industrialization, modernization, and the evolution of mass media had progressed. Newspapers, magazines, radio, and movies were beginning to create conceptions of popularity and fame. It would be only a short step to the phenomena of propaganda.

With the advent of mass media, politicians and businesses alike saw new avenues of spreading their message and advertising one's product (whether commercial or political) became as much part of everyday life as all the other aspects of modernity.

But in the Germany and Italy of the late 1920s and early 1930s, these developments led to the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century. The fascists in both countries employed the methods of propaganda first to secure their access to political power and later to proliferate their hideous and cruel ideologies. This is the dark side of modernity and mass society. The development and processes of modernity and industrialization themselves have no moral component; they do not create either good or bad outcomes. These processes create circumstances that enable equally both human rights discourse and Nazi propaganda. In this regard, Kant was right to insist on the public use of reason toward promoting enlightenment. And therein lies the difference that is crucial and that Kant, Parsons, and Habermas have argued for equally. Only an enlightenment, modernity, or modernization that enables public use of reason, public discussion, and freedom of the exchange of opinions and ideas of an ever larger number of people will yield positive results and enable its own continuation.

Terms & Concepts

Community: In Toennies' interpretation, community (Gemeinschaft) is formed by the essential will (Wesenwille). It rests on the informal and organic bonds of family, kin, and tradition. Its mechanisms work implicitly and need not be made explicit for the members of the group living in a community.

Gutenberg Galaxy: Media theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the term Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962 along the concept of a global village. In his description the invention of the printing press had a lasting and transforming effect on human consciousness, and concepts like nationalism, dualism, and rationalism could actually become widespread ideas that transformed entire cultures and societies. The Gutenberg Galaxy has expanded into the Internet Galaxy, according to Manuel Castells.

Individualization: The process of individualization in a psychological or micro-sociological interpretation that refers to the process of an individual being socialized while learning to be his/her own individual being. On a macro-sociological level, the process of individualization refers to the micro-sociological process becoming a topic of public discourse. In so far as with modernity, it might be a discussion of what it means to be an individual in society, however different from other people who are yet part of the same culture and society. Individualization means (in both contexts) the creation of an awareness of one's individuality. On the micro-level a cognitive development refers to one's close environment, on the macro-level as a topic for discussion in reference to one's society.

Media: In sociology, we can distinguish three different types of media. Media of transmission, mass media, and symbolically generalized media. This distinction relates back to the works of Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann, among others. In a very simple distinction, we can say that media of transmission are the form in which information is stored and related from one sender to one receiver (oral speech, written word, or printing or digital media). Mass media are technologies and social institutions that relate information from a sender to a mass of people (such as radio, newspapers, or the Internet). Symbolically generalized media are media that increase the likelihood of the acceptance of a communication, such as money, power, or influence.

Modernity: Even though the term modern is generally used to describe the "current and contemporary state of affairs," the intellectual concept of modernity can be described as the emergence of industrialization and thus the emergence of the public sphere. The economic situation began to change with factories, mass production, and the invention and industrial application of the steam engine as a power source.

The rise of the nation and of republicanism as political forms are both a result of the discourse in the newly emerging public sphere. The decline of the role of religion as a corollary of Enlightenment philosophy and modern science, including the theories of evolution and new cosmic models, also mark the era of modernity. It was solidified with the rise of mass media, such as newspapers, radio, and the emergence of television.

Peace of Westphalia: Established in the wake of the Thirty Years War, the Peace of Westphalia represents the beginning of modern international law. The territorial and political boundaries it established have shaped the centers of Europe for centuries.

Pre-Modernity: Pre-modernity can be described as a phase of agrarian society. Production is limited to a base of human and animal power. There is no mass production. Publication and political, religious, and scientific discourse are still intertwined and subject to localized oral and written correspondence. Political regimes are based on charismatic and traditional authority. The first epochal change toward modernity arrived with the establishment of the printing press and the large-scale distribution of printed works, enabling a wider political, religious, and scientific discourse, while also making possible a separation of these three spheres.

Society: In the work of Toennies, society is the counterpole in the dynamic mutual interaction between community and society. Society emerges from the instrumentalism of the arbitrary will. (Social) actions are not made for their own sake as the end for the group, but in the abundance of choices that are removed from the group onto the level of individuals. Freed from the bonds of the laws that govern close ties and relationships, individuals must seek explicit yet artificial bonds of integration, which create a very fragile social cohesion. The collectivity thus created by "rational wills" is society.

Thirty Years' War: The Thirty Years' War from 1618 to 1648 connected a series of skirmishes and conflicts in the context of the Reformation. Catholic and Reformist forces clashed in a power-struggle between several of the noble houses of Europe in a war that was eventually ended by the Peace of Westphalia. The cost of the war and the effects of the Peace reshaped the European political and social world profoundly and enabled the process of modernity.

Bibliography

Alexander, J. C. (2011). Dangerous frictions: The condition of modernity and its possible repair. Fudan Journal of The Humanities & Social Sciences, 4 , 1–11. Retrieved October 25, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=70127657&site=ehost-live

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Burkhardt, J. (2004). The Thirty Years' War. In, A companion to the Reformation world. Ed. by R. Po-Chia Hsia. 272–290. Malden, MA (USA)/Oxford (UK): Blackwell.

Cabraser, E. J. (2012). The essentials of democratic mass litigation. Columbia Journal of Law & Social Problems, 45 , 499–523. . Retrieved October 25, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=82480950&site=ehost-live

Durkheim, E. (1997). The division of labor in society. L. Coser, Ed. New York: The Free Press.

Durkheim, E. (1997). Suicide. New York: The Free Press.

Durkheim, E. (2008). The elementary forms of religious life. M. Cladis, Ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Foucault, M. (2008). Psychiatric power. J. Lagrange & A. Davidson, Eds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Kant, I. (1991). Political writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Riesman, D. (2001). The lonely crowd. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Simmel, G. (2004). Philosophy of money. London: Routledge.

Weber, M. (2008). The Protestant ethic and the rise of capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Suggested Reading

Eiseinstein, E. (1980). The printing press as an agent of change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Erizi, A. (2011). Different origin, (almost the) same function: The concept of subrogation in Max Weber’s work. Max Weber Studies, 11 , 231–248. Retrieved October 25, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=66338015&site=ehost-live

Gregory, B. (2012). The unintended Reformation: How a religious revolution secularized society. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Lebon, G. (1995). The crowd. Transaction.

McLuhan, M. (1962). The Gutenberg Galaxy: The making of typographic man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Weber, M. (1978). Economy and society. Berkeley: University of California Press.