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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
There is a wide measure of agreement among contemporary observers that something is seriously wrong in modern industrial society. As to the exact nature of the disorder there are differences of opinion: some denounce above all a vulgarization of culture which they see as stemming from the supremacy of mass taste; others view modern men as victims of the illnesses of overorganization, with all spontaneity and uniqueness increasingly compressed within the patterns of public and private bureaucracies; still others believe that the crucial failure of present civilization in the West is that beneath the various forms of mass and organizational “togetherness,” the individual lies stranded, as it were, on the shores of nothingness, deprived of true contact with his fellowmen, with the physical world, or even with himself. Thus there is little agreement as to how the dehumanization of contemporary man is best to be described. That such dehumanization is a fact, however, is the subject of profound and widespread consensus.
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