Welfare and leisure could substitute for democracy, allowing elites to revive hierarchy

Evidence

If scientific and technological progress, and an increasing sense of efficiency, were to revolutionize democracy more and more, then the compensation of democratic participation might one day, perhaps, be made superfluous through comprehensive welfare arrangements, and the carrot of leisure and comfort' might once again be replaced by a challenge from the stick of alienation’. … In the service of a social structure that had been freed from pity, stylized attitudes and forms of behaviour might then once again become both possible and necessary. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 615

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Compensatory welfare as a functional replacement for democratic participation, enabling a ‘social structure freed from pity’ to restratify — this is the most chilling and least self-evident claim in the chapter, and it recasts the welfare state as a depoliticizing technology.
• SEED: Angle: ‘the carrot of leisure’ — reading mid-century technocratic conservatism as anticipating contemporary arguments about consumer comfort eroding civic agency.