Mid-forties American intellectuals first attacked mass culture from the radical left.

Evidence

Before the Second World War, sociologists like Robert Park and his pupil at the University of Chicago, Herbert Blumer, had been engaged in rudimentary studies of mass society, but generally in isolation and with more hopeful conclusions. By the mid-forties, however, the interest in this type of analysis had grown both within and outside the academic community. … For the first time, popular culture was attacked from a radical rather than a conservative direction. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 652

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Postwar anti-communist consensus marginalized radical American literary theorists — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 85

Broader Connections

• Postwar anti-communist consensus marginalized radical American literary theorists #complicates (0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 85