Abstract

The theory of the culture indistry is central to critical theory and has had a major often unacknowledged impact on C. Wright Mills, Dwight Macdonald, George Gerbner, Alvin Gouldner, and others. Although the Institute didn't really develop the theory of the culture industries until after the emigration to the U.S., it can be traced back to Adorno's early 1930s writings on music, which stress the commodity character of popular music and its reifying effects. From the mid-1930s to the 1950s, there was a proliferation of mass communications and culture and the rise of the consumer society, the advent to cultural power of the commerical broadcasting systems, Roosevelt's remarkable use of radio for political persuasion, and the ever-growing popularity of cinema. During the 1940s, Adorno and Horkheimer saw in California how business interests dominated mass culture.