Book on Mass Observation

Concluding paragraph of LR Review May 2013 on The Mass Observers: A History, 1937–1949 by James Hinton:

MO can be seen as a democratising force, but its role was always somewhat ambiguous. As Hinton writes, 'The ques-tion of whether MO was doing more to empower the masses or to facilitate their manipulation by existing elites was one that hovered over its activity throughout the period covered by this book.' In Har-risson's own view the main problem on the home front was the gulf between the leaders and the led. MO's mission was to make the politicians and the civil servants aware of the attitudes and mentalities of the public. The goal was more effective leadership. The fieldworkers and the vol-unteers, committed as many of them were to the working-class cause, were self-con-sciously middle class and saw themselves as the vanguard of a planned social order in which they would do the planning. For all its radical intent, MO was symptomatic of a new managerialism: the unresolved issue of 1945 was who the new managers were to be.



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