Mass culture and affirmative culture within the conflict between individuals and society. An aproximation from the sociocritical theory

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to examine how the study of mass culture made by the Frankfurt School can analyze the conflict between individual and society, from a different perspective to that one studied by the tradition of modern philosophy, especially, from that called social contract theories. To achieve this objective we will, first, discuss the reformulation that Herbert Marcuse does about the conflict between individual and society, in the conflict culture theory of Freud; then, we will study how mass culture seems to overcome the conflict, when it, apparently has achieved a harmony between the individual and society. Our hypothesis is that Marcuse, ultimately, prefers to focus more on the conflict between individual and society than on its apparent solution. This is because, for him, the existence of the conflict maintains, at least, the conscious of the excision, a condition for the preservation of critical thinking in the society.