Influences
Adorno and Horkheimer’s work was influenced by both the broader socio-political environment in which it was written and by other major theorists. Written in California in the early 1940s by two ethnically Jewish, German émigrés, The Culture Industry is influenced by European politics and the war by which the continent was consumed. Simultaneously, the American film industry was characterised by an unprecedented level of studio monopolisation, it was "Hollywood at its most classical, American mass culture at its most Fordist".
Horkheimer and Adorno were influenced heavily by major developers of social, political and economic theory, most notably:
• Karl Marx’s theories of Alienation and Commodity Fetishism
• Max Weber’s Instrumental Reason and
• Georg Lukacs’ concept of the reification of consciousness.
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