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So I've recently begun reading Ellul's Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes and, as with New Demons, often some of the finest bits are when he succinctly summarises something that's useful to the main thread of his argument, but not directly a part of it. (I'm not really good enough at reading '60s French intellectuals to unpick a lot of his main points, because their delivery method is so odd -- to me.)

One of these succinct little summaries describes the modern world's 'instinctive popular beliefs' (as distinguished from thought-out, concrete 'philosophical notions') which unite the proletariat and the bourgeois: 'that man's aim in life is happiness, that man is naturally good, that history develops in endless progress, and that everything is matter.'

Comparing our period to past ones, I suppose you could say that the medievals would reject all four of those and that the classical world was divided on the first, second and fourth, and would've rejected the third.

(Incidentally, by 'the modern world' Ellul meant both the Eastern and Western blocs. He remarks that the remainder of the world is headed this way. I'm not sure whether that progess has finished playing out yet.)

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