Despite the pervasive feeling that much of the culture of Western democracieshas increasingly become inauthentic or phoney contemporary cultural criticsand obse... » 

Despite the pervasive feeling that much of the culture of Western democracieshas increasingly become inauthentic or phoney contemporary cultural criticsand observers have paid little attention to the traditional philosophicalcriticism of inauthentic culture that began with Socrates Aristophanes andPlato and was applied reworked and extended by such philosophical culturalcritics as St Augustine Erasmus Voltaire Nietzsche and Thorstein Veblen.This new study in the philosophy of culture and the history of ideasilluminates the problem of inauthentic culture and draws on the Westernintellectual tradition to show that our contemporary problem is actually an oldand enduring one. «