Crowd Culture

It is truly unfortunate that, until now, the work of Canon Bernard Iddings Bell has been out of print for some time. For Bell's cultural criticism was an important impetus to the formation of the postwar traditionalist conservative synthesis, drawing the attention of Russell Kirk and others. In Crowd Culture, a remarkably prescient work originally published in 1952 (before the words "dumbing down" had ever been uttered), Bell excoriated the complacent and conformist egalitarian ethos that he believed was undermining American education, religion, and culture. In an age of stultifying homogenization, Bell's relevance has never seemed greater.

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What They're Saying...

"[B]oth by the purity of his prose and he integrity of his thought, Bell represented the central traditions of civilization."
— Chronicles

"His essays on schools is brutally prophetic: already in the 1950s he saw the sowing of the seeds of the rotten fruit of modern education."
— New Oxford Review

"Fifty years after its publication, ISI Books has wisely and bravely chosen to republish Bernard Iddings Bell's Crowd Culture for thoughtful readers: a commendable choice for a number of reasons, one of them being that this book has remained extraordinarily timely."
— John Lukacs, University Bookman