Arnold Hauser (8 May 1892, Timişoara, Romania – 28 January 1978, Budapest) was an Hungarian art historian who wrote on the influence of change in social structures on art. His The Social History of Art (1951) argued that art—which began as "flat, symbolic, formalized, abstract and concerned with spiritual beings"—became more realistic and naturalistic as societies became less hierarchical and authoritarian, and more mercantile and bourgeois (Harrington).