Bread & Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay

by Patrick Brantlinger

Lively and well written, Bread and Circuses analyzes theories that have treated mass culture as either a symptom or a cause of social decadence. Discussing many of the most influential and representative theories of mass culture, it ranges widely from Greek and Roman origins, through Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Ortega y Gasset, T. S. Eliot, and the theorists of the Frankfurt Institute, down to Marshall McLuhan and Daniel Bell, Brantlinger considers the many versions of negative classicism and shows how the belief in the historical inevitability of social decay—a belief today perpetuated by the mass media themselves—has become the dominant view of mass culture in our time. While not defending mass culture in its present form, Brantlinger argues that the view of culture implicit in negative classicism obscures the question of how the media can best be used to help achieve freedom and enlightenment on a truly democratic basis.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Sociology, Ebooks, Politics

312 pages, Paperback

First published January 5, 1984

Reviews

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Don’t be fooled by JSTOR’s 2016 edition date -this is a book published in 1986, and very much a book of its time.
Juvenal’s “Bread and circuses” turned out to be quite a catchy phrase and one used by many thinkers from Roman times on, worried about how we are going downhill since the good old days of [insert your favourite golden era here] and worried only about keeping most of the population fed and stultified by dumb entertainment for the masses.

Brantlinger is supposed to be particularly interested in just how much circus there is in mass electronic media but somehow gets sidetracked -time and time again- into tracing the meme of imperial decline throughout history, so it is not until the penultimate chapter that he actually looks at mass media. There are a lot of interesting tidbits along the way, but the view of the forest is frequently lost for the number of trees he insists on looking at and snipping a quote from. In the end, his exposition is repetitive and muddled. The author has indubitably read a lot and seems determined to let us know this, but I wish he had spent more time on organizing his material and providing a better flow, instead of skipping backwards and fowards to Edward Gibbons, William Morris, Nietsche, Marx, Spengler, Marcuse, Adorno, Mathew Arnold, Benjamin, Bobbio, Freud, Horkheimer, and McLuhan amongst others, spinning the reader around until she is quite dizzy from all the name-dropping in between these big names. Brantlinger’s most quoted contemporaries makes interesting reading in their own right: Daniel Bell, Jerry Mander, and Raymond William.

There are interesting sidelights on Tertullian and Joseph Conrad and even Ivan Illich and a polemical and rather unconvincing chapter on T. S. Eliot, Ortega y Gasset and Camus.

The book often reads as if the author had jotted down copious notes and quotes and then time had run out and he simply slapped them together for publication. There is a better book struggling to get out and it would have come out if Brantlinger had taken the time to spin out the themes implicit in circuses: violence, spectactorship, entertainment, populism, misdirection, masses, power as well as analyzing possible roles of mass media for the successful exercise of democracy and prune his book.

In short, I found chapter 1 (The Two Classicisms worth reading, chapter 3, (The Opium of the People) an interesting excursus on early Christian views on circuses, chapter 4 (Some Nineteenth Century Themes -Decadence, Masses, Empire, and Gothic Revivals) a very mixed bag with some fine fragments of literary analysis, while the best and key chapter of the book is, hands down, chapter 8 (Television -Spectacularity vs McLuhanism).

A supplementary rather than a mainstream book on the subject either on the decline of cultures and empires or mass entertainment.

[Rory Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bread and Circuses is the classical phrase to describe governmental distracting and appeasing of the masses. Give them food and entertainment, and they’ll not bother troubling the political leaders.

The author suggests that modern readers will be familiar with similar issues under the more contemporary label of ‘welfare and media’ (Kindle 3%). Whether they are good ideas, or inappropriate interventions is argued over by modern readers, and that disagreement is precisely the issue which the author wants us to see reflected through the centuries

Ultimately, there is truth in the idea that populations can be distracted by governmental largesse, and so it leads naturally to the question of whether such policies are an achievement of utopia, or a sign of decadent failure. Again, opinions differ and have differed over the centuries.

This book essentially charts the diversity of views on these issues through European history, beginning with the ancient Greeks and working its way through the leading intellectuals of every era into the modern period.

Its an exhaustive summary which arguably provides far more detail than is necessary to make a point. At times the amount of detail makes it difficult to be clear what the point actually is. Yes, as the author tells us, Mass media can produce ideology instead of enlightenment, distraction instead of contemplation and narcissism instead of wisdom (Kindle 77%). But is it really a revelation that features of culture can have bad outcomes as well as good?

Readers need to be aware that this is a dated book which predates the invention of the internet. So it is unable to comment on the new types of ‘circuses’ represented by social media. This is a serious problem for the book. I am surprised that in choosing to reprint it, no thought was given to adding an appendix to bring the book up to date.

Overall I enjoyed the historical survey of opinions. But the overloading of detail and the occasional absence of a point being argued, makes it a harder read than it need be.

[Evan Ash]

Some good points but uhhhhhhhhhhhh pretty outdated

[Jacob Marr · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent interpretation of the “Bread and Circuses Theory” which has developed significantly over the past two millennia since the original writings of Juvenal in Ancient Rome. This academic work by Brantlinger delves into the theory’s applicability to modern implements such as television and is particularly useful for finding historical parallels.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apparently, civilisation is in decline, and it's the fault of the common people with their love of "mass culture". At the time this book was written, that meant television,which was the subject of something of a moral panic. What would they have made of social media or reality TV? Despite its age, though, there's a lot of food for thought.

Brantlinger documents theories of cultural decline going much further back, almost all based on the Roman Empire and repeatedly.using Juvenal's phrase of "bread and circuses". Given that this decline seems to have.been going on for a couple of hundred years, if not longer, it's a wonder that it keeps going on. Surely, we should have reached the limit of decadence long ago? (For a recent example, see The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms, though it does avoid the "bread and circuses" trope.) Socrates lamented writing and every innovation since has been decried by the self-appointed guardians of culture.

None of these theorists seems able to describe what makes one culture better than another except sometimes in vague, ultra-conservative religious terms of clearly to define their terms. (Indeed, some seem to want to go back to an imagined paganism.) They just know that things were better in the past. It is particularly striking in the early to mid 20th century writers that they fail to question why the supposedly better cultures of their youth led to the near apocalypse of the world wars. Still less do they consider things from the point of view of women, imperial subjects and the working class.

If the author is too happy to accept some of the arguments at times, he does raise objections and gives space to opposing views, allowing the reader to reach their own conclusions.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Intellectually Brantlinger is too limited to notice that all the ”smart” people quoted, are older White males, all rather idiotic, and all talking about ”the good old times”. In the end, Brantlinger has the same problem: the masses should work to pay for the smart older White males like himself, who are naturally entitled to the entertainment.

[Milad Doroudian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is more of a literature review with a bit of analysis in the Introduction and Conclusion.