Global Villager

"McLuhan has also long been a fiercely polarizing figure, especially during the height of his fame in the 1960s and ’70s. For instance, the American novelist and social critic Tom Wolfe praised him in the most extravagant terms: 'At the turn of the nineteenth century and in the early decades of the twentieth there was Darwin in biology, Marx in political science, Einstein in physics, and Freud in psychology. Since then there has been only McLuhan in communications studies.' Meanwhile, the German essayist and poet Hans Enzensberger denounced McLuhan as a 'reactionary' and a 'charlatan,' a shallow theorist who attempted to 'dissolve all political problems in smoke' and promised “the salvation of man through the technology of television.'"

Jeet Heer in The Walrus discusses the influence of Catholicism on Marshall McLuhan.