The End of Culture

These linked essays concern both the ominous failings and the proper libertarian purposes of contemporary American culture. Presenting recent cultural expression as part of a larger dialectic, the argument turns about conflicts between 'processed' and 'rebellious culture,' between the anti-sensibility of technocracy and other institutional domination and the insufficient sensibility of preservative humanistic intelligence and art. Pursuing the politics of culture, this 'aesthetic sociology' examines such issues as the effects of technological communications, structural censorship, the waste ethos, and some liberal ideologies. A group of essays analyzes the contradictory aesthetics and ethics of recent movements of cultural rebellion. Other essays examine representative cultural inadequacies including some fashionable modes of literature, sociology, and higher education. Libertarian social-cultural critics, including Paul Goodman and Herbert Marcuse, are sympathetically criticized. Through a number of essays, a contentiously libertarian view of our cultural possibilities is sketched. Originally published in 1975.