List of Tables and Graphs
List of Online Appendices
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Collective Speculation in Mediatized Populist Democracy

PART I The Speculative Media System
1. Speculation and Liquidity in Mediatized Politics and Marketized Finance
1.1 Two “Neomodern” Myths in a “Liquid” New Age
1.2. The “Modernist” Invention of the New Age of Popular Media
1.3. The Fifth Estate: The Discursive Sphere of “Neopopular” Speculation
1.4. The Mediatization of Politics
1.5. Liquidity and Collective Speculation in Late Modern Society
1.6. Structural Paradoxes in the Making of the “New Age”

2. The Rise of the Fifth Estate
2.1. The “Balanced” Model of Control in High Modern Institutions
2.2. Breaking the Balance: New Speculative Centers “above” Big Institutions
2.3. The Opening of a Sphere of Collective Speculation on Popular Resonance
2.4. The Rise of the Fifth Estate, a “Field of Restricted Symbolic Production”
2.5. Conclusion

3. Theorizing Collective Mythmaking on Media and Markets
3.1. The Free Market Belief System as Collective Myth
3.2. Collective Myths, Beyond the Constructionist Mainstreams
3.3. The Neopopular Code of Mythmaking: Scholarly Complicity and Beyond
3.4. A “Strong Media Mythology”: Addressing Neopopular Mythmaking
3.5. Understanding Popular Media Myths: From a “Weak” to a “Strong” Model

PART II. The Cultural Autonomy of Neopopular Mythmaking
Introduction to Part 2
4. Mythicizing Popular Media in Academia
4.1 Self-Propelled Binarizing
4.2. The Shared Mythical Core: Instances and Rules of Popular Control
4.3. Liquid Binarizing: The Production of Unfalsifiable Narratives
4.4. Inflating the Modernist Bubble: Self-Reproduction through Self-Expansion

5. The Myth of “Active Control” in Media-Interpreting Industries
5.1. Active Media-Using Prospects in Commercial Marketing
5.2. Controlling the Active Voter: Modernist Myths in the Discourse of Political PR
5.3. The Popular Middle: The Mythical Object of Active Control in Political Marketing

PART III. The Counterperformativity of Neopopular Mythmaking
Introduction to Part 3
6. When Being Popular Is Dangerous: The Case of a Myth-Driven Political Campaign
6.1. The Media Coverage of the New Right’s Celebratory Performance in 2001–2
6.2. The Ambiguous Reception of Celebratory Politics
6.3. Celebratory Politics and the Middle Ground of the Hungarian Electorate
6.4. Discussion: Selectivity, Repolarization, and Audience Partitioning

7. Latent Events in a Postnormal Media Environment
7.1. Neopopular Speculation and Media Eventization
7.2. Eventization and Theories of Liminality, Spectacle, and Catharsis
7.3. Latent Events as Experiential Enclaves
7.4. The Postnormal Space of Late Modern Media

Conclusion: The Dialectic of Liquid Modernity and the Crisis of Democracy

Appendix
References
Index