Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno. The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception

  • Year2016
  • LanguageRussian
  • Edition3000
  • Pages104
  • BindingPaperback
  • PublisherGarage publishing program in collaboration with Ad Marginem Press. Minima Series
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A key essay on mass culture as a tool of manipulation.

This famous essay by Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno was originally published in their Dialectic of Enlightenment and envisages the culture industry as a factory producing homogenous, standardized works of art, painting, literature, and cinema. The culture industry does not create values and encourage spiritual growth, but makes consumer products for the masses. The standardization of art in capitalism creates an effective tool for manipulating the masses.

Authors

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) was a German philosopher and sociologist, and one of the cofounders of the Frankfurt School. After the First World War he studied philosophy and psychology in Frankfurt and met Theodor Adorno, who was to become his friend and close collaborator.


Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) was a German philosopher and sociologist, composer and music theorist, and a representative of the Frankfurt School. His cultural and social critique, developed in collaboration with Max Horkheimer (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947), focuses on the recessive social and anthropological transformations conditioned by the development of the industry of mass culture and standardization of human relations in a managed society.

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