A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
Your search term is Democracy. Scroll down for the results!
🔍 Search Within Selection
Democracy is being viewed as a chapter. Search for all appearances
Viewing chapter Democracy (26 quotes)
The day of political democracy as we know it today is finished. Let me stress again that individual freedom itself will not be submerged in the new tribal society, but it will certainly assume different and more complex dimensions.
“Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media”. By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 70, reprinted in The Essential McLuhan (1995), pp 260-261
Year: 1969
[To the Playboy interviewer] …if you have difficulty envisioning something as trivial as the imminent end of elections, you’ll be totally unprepared to cope with the prospect of the forthcoming demise of spoken language and its replacement by a global consciousness.
Playboy interview, 1969, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (UK 1997 edition), p 252
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Harmony
Democracy as a by-product of certain technologies, like literacy and mechanical industry, is not something that I would take very seriously. But democracy as it belongs very profoundly with Christianity is something I take very seriously indeed.
The Hot and Cool Interview, 1967, in Essays Media Research (1997), p 46
Year: 1967
The ballot box, for example, is the product of literate Western culture—a hot box in a cool world—and thus obsolescent. The tribal will is consensually expressed through the simultaneous interplay of all members of a community that is deeply interrelated and involved, and would thus consider the casting of a “private” ballot in a shrouded polling booth a ludicrous anachronism.
Playboy Interview, in Essential McLuhan (UK 1997 edition), p 252
Year: 1997
By the time of the power press in the early 19th century, the newspapers were rapidly changing the character of politics by creating public opinion. In a new country like America the new medium of the press created the first instance of a state founded on public opinion. English political forms, predating the press, still depend much less on public opinion, as do those of Canada.
Counterblast, (1969), 125
Year: 1969
The problem has been falsely seen as democracy vs. the mass media. But the mass media are democracy. The book itself was the first mechanical mass medium.
“The New Languages”, 1956, Chicago Review, republished in Explorations 7, 1957
Year: 1956
The Gutenbeg technique of mechanizing handicrafts by minute fragmentation of "time and motion" became the ground plan of the entire American "experiment in democracy." Exactly repeatable tasks enabled the least skilled workers to get jobs at once. The Gutenberg principle of mechanization by fragmentation and specialism was extended as much to the Constitution as the ballot box and the box office. This principle was introduced equally into education and into the market place.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 44
Year: 1972
Drawn to McLuhan #15
Art in a democracy is an Instrument in an instrumental society.
“Art and Prudence,” Fleur de Lis (University of St. Louis), 1940, p 115
Year: 1940
The American Government was the first to be founded on the concept of public opinion.
“New Media as Political Forms” in Explorations 3, August (1954), p 124, reprinted as McLuhan Unbound #14 ,(2017), p 12
Year: 1954
Chapter:
America, North America
The only possibility in an oral structure is a monarchical apex of control. Where the activities of many are to be orchestrated there can be only one conductor. But the more necessary the conductor the more expendable he becomes.
“The Organization Man”, Explorations 8, October (1957),; the issue was later reprinted as Verbi-Voco-Visual, (1967), without pagination.
Year: 1957
[In the 18th century] Both the human body and the body politic soon came to be thought of as machines geared to the mathematical laws of the universe. The system of constitutional checks and balances hitched to the voting machine was the eighteenth-century contribution to political thought. For America it was decisive, since it coincided with her political origins.
The Mechanical Bride, 1951, p 134
Year: 1951
In a tribal all-at-once culture, the idea of the “public” as a differentiated agglomerate of fragmented individuals, all dissimilar but all capable of acting in basically the same way, like interchangeable mechanical cogs in a production line, is supplanted by a mass society in which personal diversity is encouraged while at the same time everybody reacts and interacts simultaneously to every stimulus. The election as we know it today will be meaningless in such a society.
As long as concentrations of men and capital were avoided, Jefferson claimed, American democracy would automatically follow different laws from that of any previous human society, because all previous politics had grown up in consequence of a scarcity of land, and hence concentration of political power. But now all men could be free, he thought, just as long as they allowed their social and political lives to be the automatic expression of small ownership.
The Mechanical Bride, 1951, p 134
Year: 1951
PLAYBOY: How will the popular will be registered in the new tribal society if elections are passé?
McLUHAN: The electric media open up totally new means of registering popular opinion. The old concept of the plebiscite, for example, may take on new relevance; TV could conduct daily plebiscites by presenting facts to 200,000,000 people and providing a computerized feedback of the popular will. But voting, in the traditional sense, is through as we leave the age of political parties, political issues and political goals, and enter an age where the collective tribal image and the iconic image of the tribal chieftain is the overriding political reality. But that’s only one of countless new realities we’ll be confronted with in the tribal village. We must understand that a totally new society is coming into being, one that rejects all our old values, conditioned responses, attitudes and institutions. If you have difficulty envisioning something as trivial as the imminent end of elections, you’ll be totally unprepared to cope with the prospect of the forthcoming demise of spoken language and its replacement by a global consciousness.
Playboy Interview (1969), in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 252
Year: 1969
If you are asking about the ordinary secular climate of the Church, or its prospects as a secular institution, I should think the opportunities for survival are a heck of a lot better than those of the United States or any other secular institution.
Interview with Edward Wakin” (1977), republished as “Our Only Hope Is Apocalypse”, in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 59
Year: 1977
Chapter:
America, North America
And the Jeffersonian dream of democracy was of a leveling-up rather than a leveling-down process. An aristocratic dream after all.
“John Dos Passos: Technique vs. Sensibility”, 1951, in The Interior Landscape (1969), p 51
Year: 1951
Associated with this effect is the republicanism of letters. Anybody, no matter what his origin or condition, has access on equal terms to the written messages of "the mighty dead," so that we can readily link, as most have done, the rise of democratic attitudes to the mechanization of writing.
“Technology and Political Change,” International Journal, Vol 7, No. 3, Summer, (1952), p 190(page number in reprint)
Year: 1952
Apart from that simple requirement, nothing could be nothing could be more democratic than our fashions which require uniformity as the mark of distinction.
“The Age of Advertising” (1953), p 557
Year: 1953
Democracy as a by-product of certain technologies…. Is not something I would take very seriously. But democracy as it belongs very profoundly with Christianity is something I take very seriously, indeed. The Christian concept of the mystical body – all men are the members of the body of Christ – this becomes technologically a fact under electric conditions.
Interview with Gerald E. Stearn, McLuhan: Hot and Cool, 1967. p. 261.
Year: 1967
You can judge the likelihood of the survival of democracy by the survival of the printed page.
“Technology Kills Democracy, McLuhan Warns Exchangers” in The Varsity (U of Toronto student newspaper), Vol. LXXXII, no 26, November 19, 1962, p 7
Year: 1962
We have seen how the Hearst press, employing the Jeffersonian arguments, really speaks for a great portion of America. Like the present ad of Revere Copper and Brass Incorporated, and with equal incoherence, unintelligibility, irrelevance, and total ignorance of the history of philosophy, politics, or economics, it rattles off the clichés and the postulates which were the intellectual currency of the philosophers of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.
The Mechanical Bride (1951), p 138
Year: 1951
Nose-counting, a cherished part of the eighteenth-century fragmentation process, has rapidly become a cumbersome and ineffectual form of social assessment in an environment of instant electric speeds. The public, in the sense of a great consensus of separate and distinct viewpoints, is finished. Today, the mass audience (the successor to the “public”) can be used as a creative, participating force. It is, instead, merely given packages of passive entertainment. Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions.
The Medium Is the Massage (1967), p 22
Year: 1967
You certainly could not run a democracy on TV news. In such an instant social situation you have no representatives, you have only participants. Automatically TV wipes out representation in government and puts the public in the position of the direct participatory activist. The student activists are merely a mild foretaste of direct public participation in politics.
“The Hardware-Software Mergers: How Successful Have They Been?” Speech at the conference, Reappraisal of the Educational Technology Industry, University of Chicago, November 16-18, 1969. Transcript, p 10
Year: 1969
Representation is disappearing very rapidly in favor of image-making. It is an 18th century gimmick based on very slow travel.
“The Hardware-Software Mergers: How Successful Have They Been?” Speech at the conference, Reappraisal of the Educational Technology Industry, University of Chicago, November 16-18, 1969. Transcript, p 10
Year: 1969
If technology is to minister to free men, men must struggle to acquire the practical disciplines related to speech as they have never struggled before. For in acquiring excellent speech men acquire the heritage of the entire civilization.
“Education of Free Men: the Liberal Arts” (1943) Typescript, p 49
Year: 1943
Chapters:
Media Study | Rhetoric
[Because technology kills democracy] If you go out and work for General Electric you are destroying democracy.
“Technology Kills Democracy, McLuhan Warns Students,” University of Toronto undergraduate newspaper The Varsity, Vol LXXXII, No. 26, November 19, 1962, p 7
Year: 1962
In going outside to be social, the European seemed more democratic than the North American going outside to be alone.
“Inside on the Outside, or the Spaced-Out American” (1976), reprinted in Marshall McLuhan the Man and His Message (1989), p 144
Year: 1976