Abstract

The passing of the first generation of critical theorists in the late 1960s-early 1970s coincided with the closing of that transitional phase of capitalist development in the US which, begun at the turn of the century with the Progressive movement (but fully articulated only with the New Deal, as a response to the Great Depression), had transformed traditional laissez-faire capitalism into its modern version. That shift also meant the obsolescence of most of the socio-political strategies originally deployed during the 1930s, institutionalized with wartime mobilization in the early 1940s, and theoretically elaborated by, among others, the Frankfurt School in the various analyses of the culture industry and the totally administered (or one-dimensional) society.