At the end of the 19th and throughout much of the 20th century, this rise of the ‘mass society’ and its concomitant loss of individuality was critiqued and commented upon by a lot of different thinkers. In order to illustrate how widespread this criticism was, we will make a short stroll through this intellectual history and highlight some of its main protagonists.

Marx was of course one of the first to analyse the consequences of this industrialized massification. He famously lamented the deplorable state of the factory worker, who became completely alienated from himself and his fellow workers as a result of his repetitive and stultifying labour. Around the same time, the political philosopher De Tocqueville discussed the ‘tyranny of the majority’ that was, according to him, an inevitable result and necessary evil of democratic regimes that hold equality and freedom as their highest values. Somewhat later, the sociologist Durkheim pointed out how the disappearance of traditional societal structures and an increasing individualization within society made the people — paradoxically — more vulnerable for mass manipulation. In a very similar vein, the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset sketched in his The Revolt of the Masses a fairly bleak picture of the emergence of the mass-man, who obeyed blindly to the only relevant rule in such a mass-society: ‘to be different is to be indecent’ — conformism became the sacred ideal of modern man.[2]

We find a similar critique within existentialist philosophy, albeit now from the perspective of the individual that is directly linked to the ideal of an ‘authentic live’ as opposed to that of the mass-man. Already Kierkegaard spoke during the first half of the 19th century of the dangers of an ‘amorph mass’ and an ‘anonymous people’ that absorbs every individual and renders it into ‘a third person’. In the 20th century, this theme was taken up again by German and French existentialist thinkers such as Heidegger, Jaspers and Sartre. All of them stressed the importance of leading an authentic life: affirm your individual freedom, accept the responsibility to determine your own life without letting it be determined by other people, and confront yourself with the existential angst that necessarily follows therefrom. To put it in a corny way: stay true to yourself and become who you really are.

In the course of the 20th century, both perspectives — on the one hand the economic and political commentary upon this emerging mass society and on the other hand the existential point of view that emphasised the importance of leading an authentic life — can be found once again in the Critical Theory of the Frankfurter Schule.[3] Dazzling analyses by Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Benjamin, and many others tried to reveal how the political and economic structures of our capitalist consumer society oppressed the individual without him being aware of it. They argued that capitalism had learned its 19th century lessons and continued to suppress and exploit the people, but now in such a way that they were being presented the illusion of individuality and freedom. After all, the long working hours seemed to be compensated with some free time in the weekends, in which you could spend your well-earned salary on a seemingly infinite amount of consumer goods or watch 500+ different channels on your television. What more freedom could you possibly desire?[4]

The critical theorists argued that this kind of freedom exists only insofar as capitalism allows for it. It is mediated by and wholly dependent upon an economical system of supply and demand that grants its existence solely to an ever increasing accumulation of capital, which must be accompanied by a simultaneous expansion and exploitation of the market if it wants to survive. The ‘free’ choices you make and the products you buy are to a large extent determined by this market, which needs you, the consumer, to be as similar as possible to all the other consumers for an efficient production, sale and economic growth. Capitalism had adjusted itself to the early critique of the physical exploitation and estrangement of the worker by enslaving people no longer to the assembly line but to the products they buy. The possibility of a constant satisfaction (and creation) of desires became a new opiate of the people and its hallucination of freedom and happiness paralysed every kind of resistance and critique.

This criticism against capitalism and consumerism became more and more prevalent during the 1960s and reached its peak during the student protests of 1968. The intellectual guru of this movement was Marcuse, and his book One-Dimensional Man became a surprising bestseller. It described how a capitalist mass-society reduced the various dimensions of human existence to only one: consumption. People work, eat and sleep in order to consume. Their whole identity seems to be based around this sole principle: I consume, therefore I am. Or even better: I am what I buy. The book was thus a grave charge against a society that made any form of authentic existence impossible. Very importantly, Marcuse explained with his concept of ‘repressive tolerance’ how any critique of this system would be incorporated and neutralised by the system itself, insofar as it could be rephrased into a demand that the market could subsequently satisfy. According to this logic, any critique on consumption eventually becomes a consumable product itself and is thereby rendered ineffective and powerless.

Ironically, it is exactly this fate that would befall the capitalist critique of the 1960s, as it was rephrased into a demand for individuality and difference, in short into a demand for authenticity. The rise of sub-cultures in the course of the second half of the 20th century and the concomitant increase of the merchandising business that stimulated these different ‘target groups’ are a clear example of his dynamic. The advertisement industry discovered the process of identity formation — products are produced and advertised as a means to become a certain person — and markets started to capitalize on our wish to become whoever we think we are or want to be. Since capitalism uprooted every kind of overarching societal structure and left us with nothing else than bare monetary exchange as a source of meaning and value, it has the incidental advantage that it accommodates for every kind of identity which sells. Identity politics and social movements as LGBTQ+ have certainly benefitted from this, and in a way, Marx’ wish to ‘to fish in the morning, hunt in the afternoon and rear cattle in the evening’ is now fully allowed for and even supported as long as it generates capital. At the same time, the formed and acquired identities become increasingly fragmented, instable, and are replaced in relatively short intervals, with the possible consequence of incessant identity crises and an overall frustration and disappointment on which we will expand below.