The keynote paper here is by Edward Shils and is an illuminating presentation of the whole problem. He begins with a brief description of what he considers the essence of mass society. We all know from direct experience that tremendous growth of the population, the complexity of urban life, the mechanization of the productive system, and a changed political structure have engendered in many countries a way of life quite different from the one existing, say, a hundred years ago. We also have to add the rapidly rising standard of living and the development of a large entertainment industry.

In a nutshell one can say that everyone in this book is concerned with two main problems: What happens to a highbrow culture of excellence in mass society? And what does the great increase in middlebrow culture do to people?

Van den Haag argues that people in mass society have lost the ability to take cultural issues seriously. The whole idea is symbolized in a statement by T. W. Adorno: "Radio has made of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony a hit tune which is easy to whistle." The theme of Hannah Arendt's contribution is related; she says popular culture has made of the classics something to be consumed rather than understood. In a way, Handlin's paper belongs in the same group. When he compares the folk culture of an earlier period with the mass culture of the industrial age, he finds a change in function. Folk art was not necessarily better but it was much closer to people's daily lives and their social traditions; "it dealt with the complete world intensely familiar to its audience and permitted a direct rapport between those who created and those who consumed this culture."

The social scientist Van den Haag, in the last part of his contribution, gives a list of properly numbered indictments of the deterioration of human relations in mass society: we have lost the taste for privacy and contemplation, have replaced sincere personal contacts with an empty gregariousness, and so on. Social participation is uninformed and vulnerable to slogans, individualism has broken all human bonds, rationality comes about at the expense of deep and sincere experiences.

An insightful, thought provoking book that consists of articles by many contributors, it is too complex and multi-faceted to do other than select one or two main strands. Well worth reading.