“Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, The”

“The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” is a chapter of a book by the critical theorists Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) and Theodor W. Adorno (1903–69), titled Dialectic of Enlightenment, written in 1944 and published in 1947. It is considered one of the canonical statements of critical theory from the Frankfurt School and its Institute for Social Research, of which Horkheimer and Adorno were members. The neo-Marxism of Horkheimer and Adorno held that the capitalist market had commodified and standardized the arts and culture, as evidenced by entertainment and popular culture, including film, radio, and music, and, in part, this is the pessimism they had hoped to capture in the coinage and usage of the term the culture industry.

Adorno was trained as a philosopher and musicologist ...