[2] Consumption of the easy pleasures of popular culture, made available by the mass communications media, renders people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances are.
[5] The essay does not suggest that all products of this system are inherently inferior, simply that they have replaced other forms of entertainment without properly fulfilling the important roles played by the now-defunct sources of culture.
[8] Horkheimer and Adorno draw attention to the problems associated with a system that 'integrates its consumers from above', arguing that in attempting to realise enlightenment values of reason and order, the holistic power of the individual is undermined.
Written in California in the early 1940s in an era which characterized them as two ethnically Jewish, German émigrés, The Culture Industry is influenced by European politics and the war by which the continent was consumed.
[11] Horkheimer and Adorno were influenced heavily by major developers of social, political and economic theory,[12] most notably: Anything made by a person is a materialization of their labour and an expression of their intentions.
This was a form of dialectic in which the audience could identify with the patriotism either sincerely (the thesis) or ironically (the antithesis) and so set the tone of the interpretation for the remainder of the film.
However, the film is manipulating specific historical events, not only as entertainment, but also as a form of propaganda by demonstrating a link between success in strategic resource management situations and specified leadership qualities.
[citation needed] Normally, only high art criticizes the world outside its boundaries, but access to this form of communication is limited to the elite classes where the risks of introducing social instability are slight.
A film like Patton is popular art which intends controversy in a world of social order and unity which, according to Adorno, is regressing into a cultural blandness.
[citation needed] Marx's theory of Historical Materialism was teleological, i.e. society follows through a dialectic of unfolding stages from ancient modes of production to feudalism to capitalism to a future communism.
As for discovering the causes of the development of the culture industry, Horkheimer and Adorno contend that it arises from companies' pursuit of the maximization of profit, in the economic sense.
Wiggershaus states: "The other side of Adorno's apparently paradoxical definition was ignored: that rational objectivity was still possible for the modern work of art, in any significant sense, only as a product of subjectivity".
Whereas he accepted the classical Marxist analysis of society, showing how one class exercises domination over another, he deviated from Marx in his failure to use dialectics as a method to propose ways to change.
Adorno's idea that the mass of the people are only objects of the culture industry is linked to his feeling that the time when the working class could be the tool of overthrowing capitalism is over.
Writing in The New Yorker in 2014, music critic Alex Ross argued that Adorno's work has a renewed importance in the digital age: "The pop hegemony is all but complete, its superstars dominating the media and wielding the economic might of tycoons...Culture appears more monolithic than ever, with a few gigantic corporations—Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon—presiding over unprecedented monopolies.
In his analysis of Harry Potter's global brand, Zipes wrote, "It must conform to the standards of exception set by the mass media and promoted by the culture industry in general.