MASS SOCIETY

The concept of "mass", The characteristics of mass society, The reactions to mass society.

Cities are full of people. The houses full of tenants. The hotels full of guests. Flights full of travelers. The
coffees full of consumers. The streets full of passersby. The antechambers of the doctors full of sick
people. The shows [...] full of spectators. [...] The multitude suddenly became visible [...]. Before, if it
existed, it went unnoticed, occupied the bottom of the social scenario; now it is advanced in the first
lines, it is itself the main character. There are no longer any protagonists: there is only one choir.

These sentences, taken from the famous book The rebellion of the masses by the Spanish José Ortega y
Gasset, were written in 1930. But the phenomenon that is included in it - and which then seemed so
explicit in its manifestations, very distant roots. Of "mass" in the sense of undifferentiated multitude
within it, of homogeneous aggregate in which individual desires disappeared from the group, there was
talk already at the beginning of the 19th century, after the French Revolution had seen the "people" the
first time to star on the political scene. The problems of the relationship between mass and individual,
with particular emphasis on the dangers that the rise of the masses led to the traditional social order
(they were also at the center of the reflection of many nineteenth-century thinkers (think of
Tocqueville). But it is only at the end of the '800, with the spread of industrialization and related
urbanization phenomena, and only in the economically more advanced countries of western Europe and
North America, which are outlining the contours of what we now call "mass society".

In mass society the majority of citizens live in large and medium-sized urban agglomerations; men are
therefore in closer contact with each other; they enter into relationships with each other with greater
frequency and ease than in the past (thanks also to the availability of means of transport,
communication and information), but these relationships often have an anonymous and impersonal
character. The system of social relations no longer passes through small traditional communities (local,
religious, professional), but belongs to large national institutions: state apparatuses, parties and in
general to "mass" organizations, which carry a weight growing on public decisions and on individual
choices themselves. The bulk of the population has left the dimension of self-consumption and almost
all have entered the circle of the market economy as producers or as consumers of goods and services.
Behaviors and mentalities tend to conform according to new general models, free from the patterns and
customs of traditional societies.