Inauthentic Culture and Its Philosophical Critics

Despite the pervasive feeling that much of the culture of Western democracies has increasingly become inauthentic or phoney, contemporary cultural critics and observers have paid little attention to the traditional philosophical criticism of inauthentic culture that began with Socrates, Aristophanes, and Plato and was applied, reworked, and extended by such philosophical cultural critics as St Augustine, Erasmus, Voltaire, Nietzsche, and Thorstein Veblen. This new study in the philosophy of culture and the history of ideas illuminates the problem of inauthentic culture and draws on the Western intellectual tradition to show that our contemporary problem is actually an old and enduring one.

Jay Newman first puts the contemporary problem of inauthentic culture into philosophical and historical context. He then goes on to show how traditional philosophical criticism of inauthentic culture can help us understand many disturbing aspects of such contemporary cultural phenomena as television and public relations, as well as contemporary forms of craftsmanship, democracy, and the academy.

Inauthentic Culture and Its Philosophical Critics will be of great interest to all those concerned with philosophy, cultural theory, and the enduring problem of cultural decline.