The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception

A key essay on mass culture as a tool of manipulation.

This famous essay by Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno was originally published in their Dialectic of Enlightenment and envisages the culture industry as a factory producing homogenous, standardized works of art, painting, literature, and cinema. The culture industry does not create values and encourage spiritual growth, but makes consumer products for the masses. The standardization of art in capitalism creates an effective tool for manipulating the masses.