Intellectuals and the Masses

In this book, John Carey examines how early twentieth-century intellectuals, including writers such as George Bernard Shaw, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and W. B. Yeats, conceived and wrote about the masses in disparaging terms.

Carey argues that these intellectuals imagined the masses as semi-human swarms, influenced by popular culture, and often advocated for elitist and exclusionary views.

The book critiques the modernist movement as a reaction against the rise of mass culture and literacy, suggesting that modernist writers deliberately made their work inaccessible to the masses to preserve their intellectual seclusion.