MASSCULT AND MIDCULT
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community, on the contrary, is a group of individuals linked
to each other by concrete interests. Something like a family, each
of whose members has his or her special place .and function while
at the same time sharing the group's economic aims (family
budget), traditions (family history), sentiments (family quar–
rels, family jokes), and values ("That's the way we do it
in
this
family!"). The scale must be small enough so that it "makes a
difference" what each person does-this is the first condition for
human, as against mass, existence. Paradoxically, the individual
in a community is both more closely integrated into the group
than is the mass man and at the same time is freer to develop
his own special personality. Indeed, an individual can only be
defined in relation to a community. A single person in nature is
not an individual but an animal; Robinson Crusoe was saved
by Friday. The totalitarian regimes, which have consciously
tried to create the mass man, have systematically broken every
communal link-family, church, trade union, local and regional
loyalties, even down to ski and chess clubs-and have reforged
them so as to bind each atomized individual directly to the
center of power.
The past cultures I admire-Periclean Greece, the city–
states of the Italian Renaissance, Elizabethan England are ex–
amples-have mostly been produced by communities, and
remarkably small ones at that. Also remarkably heterogeneous
ones, riven by faction, stormy with passionate antagonisms. But
this diversity, fatal to that achievement of power over other
countries that is the great aim of modem statecraft, seems to
have been stimulating to talent. (What could be more deadly
than the usual post-Marx vision of socialism as equality and
agreement? Fourier was far more perceptive when he based his
Utopia on cabals, rivalry, and every kind of difference including
what he called "innocent mania.") A mass society, like a crowd,
is inchoate and uncreative. Its atoms cohere not according to
individual liking or traditions or even interests but in a purely
mechanical way, as iron filings of different shapes and sizes are
