cific insights into the "devastated realm of the spirit," in Gramsci's wonderful phrase. In this connection, I was much taken by the Marxist critique of mass culture. Here the ideas of the Frankfurt school appeared to coincide with ideas advanced by American socialists associated in the thirties with Partisan Review and later with Politics, Commentary, and Dissent. These native critics, notably Dwight Macdonald and Irving Howe, had condemned Stalinism partly on the grounds that it subjected culture (as it subjected everything else) to the requirements of official dogma. Having defended artistic and intellectual independence against Kulturbolschewismus in the thirties, they went on, in the forties and fifties, to defend it against the very different but no less insidious distortions imposed by the market. The reduction of art to a commodity, they argued, had the same effect on culture that mass production had on material objects: standardization, the destruction of craftsmanship, and a proliferation of meretricious goods designed for immediate obsolescence. The critics of mass culture, as I read them, were not primarily concerned with the debasement of popular taste; nor were they arguing that mass culture served as the opiate of the people, a source of the "false consciousness" that lulled the masses into acceptance of their miserable condition. They were on the track of something more ominous: the transformation of fame into celebrity; the replacement of events by images and pseudo‐ events ; and the replacement of authoritative moral judgment by "inside‐ dopesterism," which appealed to the fear of being left behind by changing fashions, the need to know what insiders were saying, the hunger for the latest scandal or the latest medical breakthrough or the latest public opinion polls and market surveys.

The critique of mass culture provided further evidence, it seemed to me, that our society was no longer governed by a moral consensus. What held it together was "credibility"; and the Watergate affair, coming hard on the heels of the war in Vietnam—itself largely motivated by the need to maintain American credibility in the eyes of the world—seemed to indicate not merely that our public officials no longer cared about the truth but that they had lost even the capacity to distinguish it from falsehood. All that mattered was the particular version of unreality the public could be induced to "buy." Buying did not necessarily imply belief: if "disinformation," as it later came to be called, proved eminently marketable, it was because information itself was in pitifully short supply.

-30-