Modern capitalist society replaces unitary ideological canopies with multiply-plural collective representations

Evidence

As society under the conditions of modern capital and production grows more complex and multifaceted, so it is experienced as more “pluralistic” in form. In regions, classes and sub-classes, in cultures and subcultures, neighborhoods and communities, interest groups and associative minorities, varieties of life-patterns are composed and recomposed in bewildering complexity. So an apparent plurality, an infinite variety of ways of classifying and ordering social life offer themselves as “collective representations” in place of the great unitary ideological universe, the master “canopies of legitimation,” of previous epochs. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 917

Categorization

• DEFINE: Hall’s ‘master canopies of legitimation’ invokes and extends Weberian/Berger-type legitimation theory, defining what the modern media plurality displaces.
• XREF: Echoes Berger and Luckmann’s ‘sacred canopy’ model of legitimation applied to media society, and Geertz’s cultural-system approach to ideology. — connects to: Mass-society theory evolved by reconciling homogeneity with differentiation — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 156