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.
Read more about this topic: Culture Industry
Famous quotes containing the word influences:
“I don’t believe in villains or heroes, only in right or wrong ways that individuals are taken, not by choice, but by necessity or by certain still uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances and their antecedents.”
—Tennessee Williams (1914–1983)
“Without looking, then, to those extraordinary social influences which are now acting in precisely this direction, but only at what is inevitably doing around us, I think we must regard the land as a commanding and increasing power on the citizen, the sanative and Americanizing influence, which promises to disclose new virtues for ages to come.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)