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Frankfurt School, Media, and the Culture Industry

Douglas Kellner

The term “Frankfurt School” refers to the work of members of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research), which was established in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1923 as the first Marxist-oriented research center affiliated with a major German university. Under its director, Carl Grünberg, the institute's work in the 1920s tended to be empirical, historical, and oriented toward problems of the European working-class movement. Max Horkheimer became director of the institute in 1930 and gathered around him many talented theorists, including Erich Fromm, Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and T. W. Adorno. Under Horkheimer, the institute sought to develop an interdisciplinary social theory that could serve as an instrument of social transformation. The work of this era was a synthesis of philosophy and social theory, combining sociology, psychology, cultural studies, and political economy. (On the Frankfurt School, see the readers edited by Arato & Gebhardt, 1982; Bronner & Kellner, 1989. On critical studies, see Jay, 1973; Kellner, 1989; Wiggershaus, 1994.)

The first major institute project in the Horkheimer period was a systematic study of authority, an investigation into individuals who submitted to irrational authority in authoritarian regimes. This culminated in a two-volume work, Studien über Autoritätund Familie (1936), and a series of studies of fascism. (For the Frankfurt School on fascism, see Neumann, 1966; Kellner, 1989; Marcuse, 1998.) Most members of the Frankfurt School were both Jews and Marxist radicals and were forced to flee Germany after Hitler's ascendancy to power. The majority emigrated to the United States, and the institute became affiliated with Columbia University from 1931 until 1949, when it returned to Frankfurt. Since 1936, the institute has referred to its work as the “critical theory of society.” For many years, “critical theory” stood as a code for the institute's Marxism and was distinguished by its attempt to found a radical interdisciplinary social theory rooted in Hegelian–Marxian dialectics, historical materialism, and the critique of political economy and theory of revolution. Members argued that Marx's concepts of the commodity, money, value, exchange, and fetishism characterize not only the capitalist economy but also social relations under capitalism, where human relations and all forms of life are governed by commodity and exchange relations and values.

In a key article, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” Horkheimer (1937) argued that “traditional theory,” which included modern philosophy and science since Descartes, tended to be overly abstract, objectivistic, and cut off from social practice. “Critical theory,” by contrast, was grounded in social theory and (Marxian) political economy, carried out a systematic critique of existing society, and allied with efforts to produce alternatives to capitalism and bourgeois society (then in its fascist stage in much of Europe). Horkheimer (1972) wrote that critical theory's “content consists of changing the concepts that thoroughly dominate the economy into their opposites: fair exchange into a deepening of social injustice; a free economy into monopolistic domination; productive labor into the strengthening of relations that inhibit production; the maintenance of society's life into the impoverishment of the people” (p. 247). The goal of critical theory is to transform these social conditions and provide a theory of “the historical movement of the period which is now approaching its end” (p. 247).

Critical theory produced theoretical analysis of the transformation of competitive capitalism into monopoly capitalism and fascism and hoped to be part of a historical process through which capitalism would be replaced by socialism. Horkheimer (1972) claimed that “the categories which have arisen under its influence criticize the present. The Marxist categories of class, exploitation, surplus value, profit, impoverishment, and collapse are moments of a conceptual whole whose meaning is to be sought, not in the reproduction of the present society, but in its transformation to a correct society” (p. 218). Critical theory is thus motivated by an interest in emancipation and is a philosophy of social practice engaged in “the struggle for the future.” Critical theory must remain loyal to the “idea of a future society as the community of free human beings, insofar as such a society is possible, given the present technical means” (p. 230).

In a series of studies carried out in the 1930s, the Institute for Social Research developed theories of monopoly capitalism, the new industrial state; the role of technology and giant corporations in monopoly capitalism; the key roles of mass culture and communication in reproducing contemporary societies; and the decline of democracy and the individual. Critical theory drew alike on Hegelian dialectics, Marxian theory, Nietzsche, Freud, Max Weber, and other trends of contemporary thought. It articulated theories that were to occupy the center of social theory for the next several decades. Rarely, if ever, has such a talented group of interdisciplinary intellectuals come together under the auspices of one institute. They managed to keep alive radical social theory during a difficult historical era and provided aspects of a neo-Marxian theory of the changed social reality and new historical situation in the transition from competitive capitalism to monopoly capitalism.

The Culture Industry and Debates over Mass Culture

The Frankfurt School coined the term “culture industry” in the 1930s to signify the process of the industrialization of mass-produced culture and the commercial imperatives that constructed it (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1972). The critical theorists analyzed all mass-mediated cultural artifacts within the context of industrial production, where the commodities of the culture industries exhibited the same features as other products of mass production: commodification, standardization, and massification. The culture industries had the specific function, however, of providing ideological legitimation of the existing capitalist societies and of integrating individuals into its way of life.

For the Frankfurt School, mass culture and communications therefore stand at the center of leisure activity, are important agents of socialization, are mediators of political reality, and should thus be seen as major institutions of contemporary societies with a variety of economic, political, cultural, and social effects. Furthermore, the critical theorists investigated the cultural industries politically as a form of the integration of the working class into capitalist societies. The Frankfurt School theorists were among the first neo-Marxian groups to examine the effects of mass culture and the rise of the consumer society on the working classes that were to be the instrument of revolution in the classical Marxian scenario. They also analyzed how the culture industries and consumer society were stabilizing contemporary capitalism and accordingly sought new strategies for political change, agencies of political transformation, and models for political emancipation that could serve as norms of social critique and goals for political struggle.

The positions of Adorno, Leo Lowenthal, and other members of the inner circle of the Institute for Social Research were contested by Walter Benjamin, an idiosyncratic theorist loosely affiliated with the institute. Benjamin, writing in Paris during the 1930s, discerned progressive aspects in new technologies of cultural production such as photography, film, and radio. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin (1969) noted how new mass media were supplanting older forms of culture. In this context, the mass reproduction of photography, film, recordings, and publications replaced the emphasis on the originality and “aura” of the work of art in an earlier era. Freed from the mystification of high culture, Benjamin believed that mass culture could cultivate more critical individuals able to judge and analyze their culture, just as sports fans could dissect and evaluate athletic activities. In addition, Benjamin asserted that processing the rush of images of cinema helped to create subjectivities better able to parry the flux and turbulence of experience in industrialized, urbanized societies.

Benjamin worked with the prolific German artist Bertolt Brecht on films, created radio plays, and attempted to use the media as organs of social progress. In the 1934 essay “The Artist as Producer,” Benjamin (1999) argued that radical cultural creators should “refunction” the apparatus of cultural production, turning theater and film, for instance, into a forum of political enlightenment and discussion rather than a medium of “culinary” audience pleasure. Both Brecht and Benjamin wrote radio plays and were interested in film as an instrument of progressive social change. In an essay on radio theory, Brecht anticipated the Internet in his call for reconstructing the apparatus of broadcasting from one-way transmission to a more interactive form of two-way, or multiple, communication (Silberman, 2000) – a form first realized in citizens band radio and then the Internet and new media.

Moreover, Benjamin wished to promote a radical cultural and media politics concerned with the creation of alternative oppositional cultures. Yet he recognized that media such as film could have conservative effects. While he thought it was progressive that mass produced works were losing their “aura,” their magical force, and were opening cultural artifacts for more critical and political discussion, Benjamin recognized that film could create a new kind of ideological magic through the cult of celebrity and techniques such as the close-up that fetishized certain stars or images via cinematic technology. Benjamin was thus one of the first radical cultural critics to look carefully at the form and technology of media culture in appraising its complex nature and effects. Benjamin also developed a unique approach to cultural history that is one of his most enduring legacies. In a micrological history of Paris in the eighteenth century, Benjamin used careful study of particulars and singular events to elucidate the more general contours of the epoch. This uncompleted project contains a wealth of material for study and reflection (see Benjamin, 2000, and the studies in Buck-Morss, 1977, 1989) and illustrates his obsession with both intensely focusing on particulars and creating constellations of categories that provide more comprehensive theoretical and historical vision and understanding.

Horkheimer and Adorno (1972) answered Benjamin's optimism concerning the mass media in a highly influential analysis of the culture industry published in their book Dialectic of Enlightenment, which first appeared in 1948 and was translated into English in 1972. They argued that the system of cultural production dominated by film, radio broadcasting, newspapers, and magazines was controlled by advertising and commercial imperatives and served to create subservience to the system of consumer capitalism. While later critics pronounced their approach too manipulative, reductive, and elitist, it provides an important corrective to more populist approaches to media culture that downplay how media industries exert power over audiences and help produce thought and behavior that conforms to the existing society (see Kellner, 1989, 1995).

The analyses by members of the institute of the functions of culture, ideology, and the mass media in contemporary societies constitute one of its most valuable legacies. The critical theorists excelled as critics of both so-called “high culture” and “mass culture” while producing many important texts in these areas. Their work is distinguished by the close connection between social theory and cultural critique and by their ability to contextualize culture within social environments and struggles. In particular, their theory of culture was bound up with analysis of the dialectic of enlightenment. Culture – once a refuge of beauty and truth – was falling prey, they believed, to tendencies toward rationalization, standardization, and conformity that they saw as a consequence of the triumph of the instrumental rationality that was coming to pervade and structure ever more aspects of life. Thus, while culture once cultivated individuality, it was now promoting conformity and was a crucial part of “the totally administered society” that was producing “the end of the individual” (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1972).

Their analysis of the fate of culture in modernity was part and parcel of the Frankfurt School's pessimism concerning the rise of the totally administered society in its fascist, democratic state capitalist, and state communist forms. Yet the group continued to privilege culture as an important, and often overlooked, source of social knowledge, as well as a potential form of social criticism and opposition. As Adorno (1967) once wrote:

This passage points both to the Frankfurt School's position that administered culture was coming to play ever more fundamental roles in social production and reproduction and to the position that analysis of culture can provide crucial insights into social processes. Critical theory thus assigned a central role to cultural criticism and ideology critique precisely because of the key functions of culture and ideology within contemporary capitalist societies. This focus, which corresponded to some of the institute members' deepest interests, took the form of a systematic inquiry into the different types, forms, and effects of culture and ideology in contemporary capitalist societies. These ranged from theoretical reflections on the dialectics of culture, which are the ways in which culture could be both a force of social conformity and opposition, to critiques of mass culture and aesthetic reflections on the emancipatory potential of high art.

Adorno (1978) began the institute critique of mass culture in his 1932 article “On the Social Situation of Music” and continued it in a series of studies of popular music and other forms of mass culture over the next decades (see Buck-Morss, 1977). Adorno (1978, 1982) initially criticized popular music production for its commodification, rationalization, fetishism, and reification of musical materials – thus applying the key neo-Marxist social categories to culture – as well as the “regression” in hearing produced by popular music. The framework for his critique was thus the institute theory of the spread of rationalization and reification into every aspect of social life and the resultant decline of the individual.

Hence, while the origins of the institute's approach to mass culture and communication are visible in Adorno's early writings on music, the Frankfurt group did not really develop the theory of the culture industry until their emigration to the United States in the 1930s. During their exile period from the mid-1930s through the 1940s, members of the group witnessed the proliferation of mass communications and culture and the rise of the consumer society, experiencing first-hand the advent to cultural power of the commercial broadcasting systems, President Roosevelt's remarkable use of radio for political persuasion, and the ever-growing popularity of cinema when 85 million to 110 million US citizens paid to see “the movies” each week. Further, they experienced the widespread popularity of magazines, comic books, cheap fiction, and the other flora and fauna of the new mass produced culture.

From their vantage point in California during the 1940s – where many of their exiled compatriots from Germany worked in the film industry – Adorno and Horkheimer were able to experience how business interests dominated mass culture and could observe the fascination the entertainment industries exerted within the emerging media and consumer society. Marcuse, Lowenthal, and others, who worked in Washington during this period for the Office of War Information and the US intelligence services, were able to observe government use of mass communications as instruments of political propaganda (Marcuse, 1998). The critical theorists thus came to see what they called the “culture industry” as a central part of a new configuration of capitalist modernity that used culture, advertising, mass communications, and new forms of social control to induce consent to and reproduce the new forms of capitalist society. The production and transmission of media spectacles that transmit ideology and consumerism through the means of allegedly “popular entertainment” and information were, they believed, a central mechanism through which contemporary society came to dominate the individual.

Adorno and Horkheimer adopted the term “culture industry,” as opposed to concepts such as “popular culture” or “mass culture,” because they wanted to resist notions that products of the culture industry emanated from the masses (that is, from the people). They saw the culture industry as being an administered culture, imposed from above, as instruments of indoctrination and social control. The term culture industry thus contains a dialectical irony typical of the style of Frankfurt School critical theory: culture, as traditionally valorized, is supposed to be opposed to industry and expressive of individual creativity while providing a repository of humanizing values. In the culture industry, however, culture has come to function as a mode of ideological domination and social control rather than of humanization or emancipation.

The culture industry was perceived as the culmination of a historical process in which technology and scientific organization and administration came to dominate thought and experience. Although Horkheimer and Adorno (1972) carry out a radical questioning of Marxism and the development of an alternative philosophy of history and theory of society in Dialectic of Enlightenment, their theory of the culture industry provides a neo-Marxian account of mass media and culture that helps explain both how the culture industry reproduces capitalist societies and why socialist revolutions fail to take place in these societies. In this sense, the institute theory of “culture industry as mass deception” provides a rebuttal both to Lukács's theory of revolution and “class consciousness,” and to Brecht's and Benjamin's belief (Silberman, 2000) that the new forces of mass communication – especially radio and film – could serve as instruments of technological progress and social enlightenment that could be turned against the capitalist relations of production and could be used as instruments of political mobilization and struggle (Kellner, 1989).

For Horkheimer and Adorno, by contrast, these new technologies were used as instruments of ideological mystification and class domination. Against Lukács (1972) and others who argued that capitalist society necessarily radicalized the working class and produced class consciousness, Horkheimer and Adorno argued that the culture industry inhibits the development of class consciousness by providing the ruling political and economic forces with a powerful instrument of social control. The conception of the culture industry therefore provides a model of a technically advanced capitalist society that mobilizes support for its institutions, practices, and values from below, making class consciousness more difficult to attain than before. Using Gramsci's (1971) terminology, the culture industry reproduces capitalist hegemony over the working class by engineering consent to the existing society and thus establishing a socio-psychological basis for social integration. Whereas fascism destroyed civil society (or the “public sphere”) through politicizing mediated institutions, or using force to suppress all dissent, the culture industry coaxes individuals into the privacy of their own home or the movie theater, producing consumers–spectators of media events and escapist entertainment who are being subtly indoctrinated into dominant ideologies.

For the Frankfurt School, mass culture and communications therefore stand in the center of leisure activity, are important agents of socialization and mediators of political reality, and should thus be seen as major institutions of contemporary societies with a variety of economic, political, cultural, and social effects. Furthermore, the critical theorists investigated the cultural industry politically as a form of integration of the working class into capitalist societies. The Frankfurt School theorists were among the first neo-Marxian groups to examine the effects of mass culture and the rise of the consumer society on the working classes, which were to be the instrument of revolution in the classical Marxian scenario. They also analyzed the ways that the culture industry and consumer society were stabilizing contemporary capitalism and accordingly sought new strategies for political change, agencies of political transformation, and models for political emancipation that could serve as norms of social critique and goals for political struggle. The analysis of the culture industry stands, therefore, in a quite ambivalent relationship to classical Marxism. On one hand, the theory is part of the foundation for the critical theory of society, replacing the critique of political economy that had been the foundation for social theories in the Marxian tradition. It also served as an important part of the explanation of why the institute's critical theorists no longer placed faith in the revolutionary vocation of the proletariat. Yet in other ways, the analysis of the culture industry employs Marxian arguments through stressing capitalist control of culture, the commodification and reification of culture, its ideological functions, and the ways that it integrates individuals into capitalist society.

Horkheimer and Adorno (1972) use a model that pits the individual against its “adversary – the absolute power of capitalism” (p. 120) and describe the tendencies toward conformity, standardization, and deception in the culture industry by means of its control by monopoly corporations that themselves are central to the capitalist system. The very processes of production in the culture industry are modeled on factory production where everything is standardized, streamlined, coordinated, and planned down to the last detail. Indeed, Horkheimer and Adorno use their analysis of the culture industry to call attention to what they perceive as the fundamental traits of the administered society and to carry out a radical critique of capitalism. They suggest that reflection on the culture industries illuminates the processes toward standardization, homogenization, and conformity that characterize social life under what they call “totalitarian capitalism.” The tendencies toward manipulation and domination in the culture industry illuminate similar trends throughout capitalist society.

The “mass deception” present in the culture industries is similar to the deception, false promises, and manipulation in the capitalist economic, political, and social spheres. In this conception, one of the main trends of contemporary capitalist societies is the synthesis of advertising, culture, information, politics, and manipulation that characterizes the culture industries. This dialectical focus on the relationships between the culture industry and capitalism points to a basic methodological position within the institute's critical theory of society that in turn marks its affinity to Marxian dialectics. For critical theory, every social phenomenon must be interpreted in terms of a theory of society that itself is part of a theory of capitalism. The theory of the relationships between society and the economy illuminates phenomena such as the culture industry, and its analysis in turn sheds light on the economy and society. Consequently, critical theory operates with a dialectic between its topics of analysis (the culture industry, anti-Semitism, or other themes) and its theory of society. In this dialectic, the theory of society illuminates the topic under investigation, which in turn illuminates the fundamental social trends (i.e., commodification, reification, etc.) described in the social theory

In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno (1972) describe the style of culture industry products and the formulas, conventions, and stereotypes that constitute it, as well as several of the strategies used to indoctrinate its consumers into acceptance of the existing society. “Entertainment,” they claim, accustoms the audiences to accept existing society as natural by endlessly repeating and reproducing similar views of the world that present the existing way of life as the way of the world. The eternal recurrence of the same in the culture industry changes, they suggest, the very nature of ideology:

The culture industry thus tries to induce the individual to identify with society's typical figures and models:

The culture industry thus serves as a powerful instrument of social control that induces individuals to accept their fate and conform to existing society. Advertising progressively fuses in style and technique with the entertainment of the culture industry (pp. 156–167), which in turn can be read as advertisements for the existing society and established way of life.

From World War II to the Postwar Epoch

During World War II, the institute split up because of pressures of the war. Horkheimer and Adorno moved to California, while Lowenthal, Marcuse, Neumann, and others worked for the US government as their contribution in the fight against fascism. Horkheimer and Adorno (1972) worked on the Dialectic of Enlightenment, which sketched out a vision of history from the Greeks to the present that discussed how reason and enlightenment became their opposite, transforming what promised to be instruments of truth and liberation into tools of domination. Under the pressure of societal systems of domination, reason became instrumental, reducing human beings to things and objects and nature to numbers. While such modes of abstraction enabled science and technology to develop apace, it also produced societal reification and domination, culminating in the concentration camps that generated an instrumentalization of death. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, reason thus turned instrumental, where science and technology had created horrific tools of destruction and death, culture was commodified into products of a mass produced culture industry, and democracy terminated in fascism in which masses chose despotic and demagogic rulers. Moreover, in their extremely pessimistic vision, individuals were oppressing their own bodies and renouncing their own desires as they assimilated and allowed themselves to be instruments of labor and war. Sharply criticizing enlightenment scientism and rationalism, as well as systems of social domination, Horkheimer and Adorno implicitly implicated Marxism within the “dialectic of enlightenment” because it too affirmed the primacy of labor, instrumental-ized reason in its scientism and celebration of “socialist production,” and shared in Western modernity and the domination of nature. After World War II, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Pollock returned to Frankfurt to re-establish the Institute for Social Research, while Lowenthal, Marcuse, and others remained in the United States.

In Germany, Adorno, Horkheimer, and their associates published a series of books and became a dominant intellectual current. At this time, the term “Frankfurt School” became widespread as a characterization of their version of interdisciplinary social research and of the particular social theory developed by Adorno, Horkheimer, and their associates (Wiggershaus, 1994). They engaged in frequent methodological and substantive debates with other social theories, most notably the “positivism dispute,” where they criticized more empirical and quantitative approaches to social theory and defended their more speculative and critical brand of social theory. The German group around Adorno and Horkheimer was also increasingly hostile toward orthodox Marxism and was in turn criticized by a variety of types of “Marxism-Leninism” and “scientific Marxists” for their alleged surrender of revolutionary and scientific Marxian perspectives.

The Frankfurt School eventually became best known for its theories of “the totally administered society” or “one-dimensional society,” which analyzed the increasing power of capitalism over all aspects of social life and the development of new forms of social control. During the 1950s, however, there were divergences between the work of the institute relocated in Frankfurt and the developing theories of Fromm, Lowenthal, Marcuse, and others who did not return to Germany. They often were at odds with both the current and earlier work of Adorno and Horkheimer. Thus it is misleading to consider the work of various critical theorists during the postwar period as members of a monolithic Frankfurt School. Whereas there was both a shared sense of purpose and collective work on interdisciplinary social theory from 1930 to the early 1940s, thereafter critical theorists frequently diverged, and during the 1950s and 1960s the term “Frankfurt School” can really be applied only to the work of the institute in Germany.

Following the lead of Horkheimer and Adorno, other critical theorists such as Fromm, Marcuse, and Habermas also attributed a fundamental role to the media and culture industries in their critical social theories. Their books helped lead many social theorists to perceive the importance of mass culture and communication in social reproduction. Fromm's first book published in the United States, Escape from Freedom (1941), applied the culture industry model to a critique of advertising, mass culture, and political manipulation. After discussing some of the techniques of modern advertising, Fromm notes:

Fromm then calls attention to how mass communications dull capacity for critical thinking and contribute to the decline of the individual (p. 128), painting a picture of the style of the period:

Fromm (1941) also analyzes how public opinion is shaped by news media and how socialization patterns contribute to the decline of the individual. In 1955, the institute critique of the culture industries plays a central role in both Fromm's The Sane Society (1955) and Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955). Using Freudian and Marxian categories, Marcuse described the process through which sexual and aggressive instincts are tamed and channeled into socially necessary, but unpleasant, labor. Following the institute analysis of changes in the nature of socialization, Marcuse notes the decline of the family as the dominant agent of socialization and the rise of the mass media.

In general, the characteristic themes of Marcuse's post-World War II writings build on the Frankfurt School's analyses of the role of technology and technological rationality; administration and bureaucracy; the capitalist state; mass media and consumerism; and new modes of social control, which institute scholars saw as producing both a decline in the revolutionary potential of the working class and a decline of individuality, freedom, and democracy. In Marcuse's view, the mass media were becoming dominant agents of socialization that were displacing the primacy of the family – its role in both Freudian and many US social science theories. The result is the decline of individual autonomy and manipulation of mind and instincts by mass communications:

Marcuse continued to stress the manipulative effects of the culture industries in his major works and contributed to the widespread adoption of the so-called “manipulation theory” of the media by the New Left and others in the 1960s.

In One-Dimensional Man (1964). Marcuse provides an analysis of the synthesis of business, the state, the media, and other cultural institutions under the hegemony of corporate capital, which he argues characterizes the US economy and polity in the era of “advanced industrial society.” Marcuse claims that the inanities of commercial radio and television confirm his analyses of the decline of the individual and the demise of authentic culture and oppositional thought in “advanced industrial society.” Throughout the book, Marcuse assigns an important role to the media as “new forms of social control” that engender “false needs” and “one-dimensional” thought and behavior necessary for the smooth reproduction of advanced capitalism. Marcuse's analyses were influential on the New Left that was criticizing and rebelling against a conservative capitalism and imperialism in the 1960s, but with the rise of global revolutionary movements, Marcuse revised his theory of “one-dimensional society” to articulate the new social antagonisms, struggles, and possibilities for change (Kellner, 1984; Marcuse, 2005).

Habermas, the Public Sphere, and the Media

In the 1950s, Jürgen Habermas was strongly influenced by Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. which he first read in 1955. Habermas resolved to work with Horkheimer and Adorno because he believed they were establishing a dialectical and critical theory of society within a creative and innovative Marxist tradition. He thus went to Frankfurt and continued his studies in the Institute for Social Research and published his first major book, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962), which analyzed the rise of the culture industries and decline of the public sphere within liberal democracy. Combining historical and empirical research with the theoretical framework of critical theory, Habermas traced the historical rise and decline of what he called the “bourgeois public sphere” and its replacement by the mass media, technocratic administration, and societal depoliticization.

Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere was published in 1962 and contrasted various forms of an active, participatory bourgeois public sphere in the heroic era of liberal democracy with the more privatized forms of spectator politics in a bureaucratic industrial society in which the media and elites control the public sphere. The two major themes of the book include analysis of the historical genesis of the bourgeois public sphere, followed by an account of the structural change of the public sphere in the contemporary era with the rise of state capitalism, the culture industries, and the increasingly powerful positions of economic corporations and big business in public life. On this account, big economic and governmental organizations took over the public sphere while citizens became content to become primarily consumers of goods, services, political administration, and spectacle.

Generalizing from developments in Britain, France, and Germany in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Habermas first sketched out a model of what he called the “bourgeois public sphere” and then analyzed its degeneration in the twentieth century. As Habermas (1989) puts it in the preface to the book, “our investigation presents a stylized picture of the liberal elements of the bourgeois public sphere and of their transformation in the social-welfare state” (p. xix). The project draws on a variety of disciplines including philosophy, social theory, economics, and history, and thus instantiates the Institute for Social Research mode of a supradisciplinary social theory. Its historical optic grounds it in the institute project of developing a critical theory of the contemporary era and its political aspirations position it as critique of the decline of democracy in the present age and a call for its renewal – themes that would remain central to Habermas's thought.

After delineating the idea of the bourgeois public sphere, public opinion, and publicity (Öffentlichkeit), Habermas analyzes the social structures, political functions, and concept and ideology of the public sphere before depicting the social–structural transformation of the public sphere, changes in its public functions, and shifts in the concept of public opinion in the concluding three chapters. The text is marked by the conceptual rigor and fertility of ideas characteristic of Habermas's writing but contains more substantive historical grounding than much of his work and in retrospect discloses the matrix out of which his later work emerges.

The bourgeois public sphere, which Habermas argues began around 1700, was to mediate between the demands and concerns of social and public life and the private concerns of individuals in their familial, economic, and social life. This involved mediation of the contradiction between bourgeois and citoyen, to use terms developed by Hegel and the early Marx, overcoming private interests and opinions to discover common interests and to reach societal consensus. The public sphere consisted of organs of information and political debate such as newspapers and journals, as well as institutions of political discussion such as parliaments, political clubs, literary salons, public assemblies, pubs and coffee houses, meeting halls, and other public spaces where sociopolitical discussion took place. For the first time in history, individuals and groups could shape public opinion, giving direct expression to their needs and interests while influencing political practice. The bourgeois public sphere made it possible to form a realm of public opinion that opposed state power and the powerful interests that were coming to shape bourgeois society.

Habermas's concept of the public sphere thus described a space of institutions and practices between the private interests of everyday life in civil society and the realm of state power. The public sphere thus mediates between the domains of the family and the workplace – where private interests prevail – and the state, which often exerts arbitrary forms of power and domination. What Habermas called the “bourgeois public sphere” consisted of social spaces where individuals gathered to discuss their common public affairs and to organize against arbitrary and oppressive forms of social and public power. The principles of the public sphere involved an open discussion of all issues of general concern in which discursive argumentation was employed to ascertain general interests and the public good. The public sphere thus presupposed freedoms of speech and assembly, a free press, and the right to freely participate in political debate and decision-making. After the democratic revolutions, Habermas suggested, the bourgeois public sphere was institutionalized in constitutional orders that guaranteed a wide range of political rights and established a judicial system that was to mediate between claims between various individuals or groups, or between individuals and groups and the state.

Many defenders and critics of Habermas's notion of the bourgeois public sphere fail to note that the thrust of his study is precisely that of transformation, of the mutations of the public sphere from a space of rational discussion, debate, and consensus to a realm of mass cultural consumption and administration by corporations and dominant elites. This analysis assumes and builds on the Frankfurt School model of the transition from market capitalism and liberal democracy in the nineteenth century to the stage of state and monopoly capitalism evident in European fascism and the welfare-state liberalism of the New Deal in the United States in the 1930s. For the institute, this constituted a new stage of history, marked by fusion between the economic and political spheres, a manipulative culture industry, and an administered society, all characterized by a decline of democracy, individuality, and freedom. Habermas added historical grounding to the institute theory, arguing that a “refeudalization” of the public sphere began in the late nineteenth century. The transformation involved private interests assuming direct political functions as powerful corporations came to control and manipulate the media and state. On the other hand, the state began to play a more fundamental role in the private realm and everyday life, thus eroding the difference between state and civil society, between the public and private sphere. As the public sphere declined, citizens became consumers, dedicating themselves more to passive consumption and private concerns than to issues of the common good and democratic participation.

While in the bourgeois public sphere, Habermas argued, public opinion was formed by political debate and consensus, in the debased public sphere of welfare-state capitalism, public opinion is administered by political, economic, and media elites who manage public opinion as part of systems management and social control. Thus, while in an earlier stage of bourgeois development, public opinion was formed in open political debate concerning interests of common concern that attempted to forge a consensus in regard to general interests, in the contemporary stage of capitalism, public opinion was formed by dominant elites and thus represented for the most part their particular private interests. Instead of a pursuit for a rational consensus among individuals and groups in the interest of the common good, contemporary politics is characterized by a struggle among groups to advance their private interests.

Hence, Habermas describes a transition from the liberal public sphere that originated in the Enlightenment and the American and French revolutions to a media-dominated public sphere in the current era of what he calls “welfare-state capitalism and mass democracy.” This historical transformation is grounded, as noted, in Horkheimer and Adorno's analysis of the culture industry in which giant corporations have taken over the public sphere and transformed it from a sphere of rational debate into one of manipulative consumption and passivity. In this transformation, “public opinion” shifts from rational consensus emerging from debate, discussion, and reflection to the manufactured opinion of polls or media experts. Rational debate and consensus have thus been replaced by managed discussion and manipulation by the machinations of advertising and political consulting agencies where, Habermas (1989) argues, “publicity loses its critical function in favor of a staged display; even arguments are transmuted into symbols to which again one cannot respond by arguing but only by identifying with them” (p. 206).

For Habermas, the function of the media has thus been transformed from facilitating rational discourse and debate within the public sphere into shaping, constructing, and limiting public discourse to those themes validated and approved by media corporations. Hence, the interconnection between a sphere of public debate and individual participation has been fractured and transmuted into that of a realm of political information and spectacle in which citizen–consumers passively ingest and absorb entertainment and information. “Citizens” thus become spectators of media presentations and discourse that mold public opinion, reducing consumer/citizens to objects of news, information, and public affairs. Habermas (1989) argues that “inasmuch as the mass media today strip away the literary husks from the kind of bourgeois self-interpretation and utilize them as marketable forms for the public services provided in a culture of consumers, the original meaning is reversed” (p. 171).

Habermas (1989) offered tentative proposals to revitalize the public sphere by setting “in motion a critical process of public communication through the very organizations that mediatize it” (p. 232). He concluded with the suggestion that “a critical publicity brought to life within intraorganizational public spheres” (p. 232) might lead to democratization of the major institutions of civil society, though he did not provide concrete examples, propose any strategies, or sketch out the features of an oppositional or postbourgeois public sphere. Still, Horkheimer found Habermas's works to be too left wing, in effect rejecting the study of the public sphere as a Habilitations dissertation, and he refused to publish it in the institute monograph series (Wiggershaus, 1994, p. 555). It was published, however, in 1962 and received both an enthusiastic and critical reception in Germany; when translated into English in 1989, it promoted yet more discussion of Habermas and the public sphere, and lively debates continue today (Calhoun, 1993).

Critique and Contemporary Relevance

Like every theoretical conception, the notion of the culture industry was a product of its historical period and its insights and limitations result primarily from the fact that it theorized features of a particular historical conjuncture. The institute's conception of the role of mass culture and communication was first shaped in the period of Nazi Germany where they witnessed Hitler's extraordinary use of mass communications and fascist spectacles. Obviously, the experience of fascism shaped the critical theorists' views of the rise of a behemoth state and cultural apparatus combined with an eclipse of democracy, individuality, and what they saw as authentic art. And in exile in the United States, they observed President Roosevelt's impressive use of the media and the propagandistic uses of the mass media during World War II. Consequently, political use and control of the media during conditions of warfare, with an enlarged wartime state and subordinate wartime economy, coupled with capitalist control of the entertainment industries, provided the historical roots of the institute model of the culture industry as instruments of social control. Indeed, under this type of militarized social system and war conditions, the media – whether liberal–democratic, fascist, or state socialist – tend to be rather one dimensional and propagandistic. Moreover, the Frankfurt School model of the media and society also rather accurately described certain dominant trends and effects during the Cold War when the media were enlisted in the anti-communist crusade and when media content was subject to tight control and censorship – a situation signaled by Horkheimer and Adorno's allusions to “purges” (1972, p. 123).

The culture industry theory was thus developed in the United States during the heyday of the press, radio, and cinema as dominant cultural forms; it was published just before the introduction of television, whose importance Adorno and Horkheimer, and other members of their group, anticipated. Not only did the Frankfurt School scholars provide an early model of critical communications research, but they were also among the first to see the importance of mass communications and culture for social theory and influenced some of the early attempts to incorporate such themes into critical social theory, influencing C. Wright Mills, David Riesman, and other social theorists to see the multiple functions of the media and mass communications in contemporary culture (Kellner, 1989).

The critique of the culture industry was thus one of the most influential aspects of Frankfurt School critical theory, and its impact on social theory and on theories and critiques of mass communication and culture accounts in part for the continuing interest in the Frankfurt School today. Yet from the beginning, critics of the institute's theory of mass culture stressed the similarity of the critical theory analysis to conservative critics of mass culture and condemned them for their cultural elitism (see Kellner, 1989, 1995). In retrospect, despite their many virtues, there are serious flaws in the original analysis of the culture industry. Overcoming the limitations of the classical model would include: more concrete and empirical analysis of the political economy of the media and the processes of the production of culture; more empirical and historical research into the construction of media industries and their interaction with other social institutions; more empirical studies of audience reception and media effects; and the incorporation of new cultural theories and methods into a reconstructed critical theory of culture and the media. Cumulatively, such a reconstruction of the classical Frankfurt School project would update the critical theory of society and its activity of cultural criticism by incorporating contemporary developments in social and cultural theory into the enterprise of critical theory.

In addition, the Frankfurt School dichotomy between high culture and low culture is problematical and should be superseded for a more unified model that takes culture as a spectrum and applies similar critical methods to all cultural artifacts ranging from opera to popular music, from modernist literature to soap operas. In particular, the Frankfurt School model of a monolithic mass culture contrasted with an ideal of “authentic art,” which limits critical, subversive, and emancipatory moments to certain privileged artifacts of high culture, is highly problematic. The Frankfurt School position that all mass culture is ideological and debased, having the effects of duping a passive mass of consumers, is also objectionable. Instead, one should see critical and ideological moments in the full range of culture and not limit critical moments to high culture and identify all of low culture as ideological (see Bloch, 1986, Jameson, 1979, Kellner, 1995). One also should allow for the possibility that critical and subversive moments could be found in the artifacts of the cultural industries as well as the canonized classics of high modernist culture that the Frankfurt School seemed to privilege as the site of artistic opposition and emancipation. One should also distinguish between the encoding and decoding of media artifacts and recognize that an active audience often produces its own meanings and uses for products of the cultural industries, an argument made by British cultural studies (Hall, 1980; Hall, Hobson, Lowe, & Willis, 1991).

In contrast to the mode of condemnatory criticism associated with Frankfurt School critical theory, many forms of radical cultural criticism today have been developing more complex strategies and attempts to develop more multidimensional approaches to mass culture. Rather than seeing its artifacts simply as expressions of hegemonic ideology and ruling-class interests, it is more useful to see popular entertainment as complex products that contain contradictory moments of desire and its displacement, articulations of hopes and their repression. In this view, popular culture provides access to a society's dreams and nightmares and contains both ideological celebrations of the status quo and utopian moments of transcendence, moments of opposition and rebellion, and its attempted containment. Recent studies of popular culture also perceive how social struggles and conflicts enter into works of popular entertainment and see culture as a contested terrain rather than a field of one-dimensional manipulation and illusion (Kellner, 1995, 2010, Kellner & Ryan, 1988). For example, Kellner (1995) argues that contemporary media culture reproduces social struggles about politics and ideology, gender, race, class, sexuality, and other key issues and has oppositional and critical potential in addition to reproducing dominant ideologies.

Contemporary critical theories of culture and communication must therefore be able to develop more complex methods of cultural interpretation and criticism that pay attention to and conceptualize the contradictions, articulations of social conflicts, oppositional moments, subversive tendencies, and the projection of utopian images and scenes of happiness and freedom that appear within mainstream commercial culture. The classical critical theory approach, especially Adorno's work, generally limits itself, however, to attacking the ideology and purely retrogressive effects of radio, popular music, films, television, and so on. Moreover, there is a tendency to postulate a passive audience that is the object of ideological domination, resisted, however, by theorists such as Benjamin discussed above.

British cultural studies, by contrast, postulates an active audience that can produce its own meanings and uses for media culture (Hall et al., 1991). Contemporary cultural studies also has expanded the critique of ideology to include gender, race, sexuality, and other dimensions of media texts (Hammer & Kellner, 2009). By contrast, Horkheimer and Adorno's (1972) model of the culture industry does not allow for the heterogeneity of popular culture and contradictory effects, instead straitjacketing popular culture in the form of reification and commodification as signs of the total triumph of capital and the total reification of experience. To be sure, much popular culture (such as Top 40 music and certain Hollywood blockbuster films) lend themselves precisely to Adorno's categories and critique, though, as suggested, certain forms of oppositional music, film, and television resist his categories and require a more complex approach to cultural interpretation and critique.

Contemporary critical approaches to media culture should thus not simply limit themselves to denouncing bourgeois ideologies and escapist functions. Even conservative media culture often provides insights into forms of dominant ideologies and sometimes unwittingly provides images of social conflict and opposition. Studies of Hollywood films, for instance, reveal that this form of commercial culture exhibits a conflict of representations between competing social ideologies over the last several decades (Kellner, 2010; Kellner & Ryan, 1988). Particularly, since about 1967, a variety of competing ideological standpoints have appeared in mainstream Hollywood films. Consequently, there is no one monolithic, dominant ideology that the culture industry promotes, and indeed the conflicting ideologies in contemporary culture industry artifacts point to continuing and intensifying social conflict within capitalist societies.

However, precisely the critical focus on media culture from the point of view of commodification, industrialization, reification, ideology, and domination provides a perspective useful as a corrective to more populist and uncritical approaches to media culture that surrender critical perspectives, arguments made by Gunster (2004) and Steinert (2003). In contrast to approaches that displace concepts of ideology and domination by emphasizing audience pleasure and the construction of meaning, the Frankfurt School is valuable for inaugurating systematic and sustained critiques of ideology and domination within the culture industry, indicating that it is not an innocent “creative industry,” as certain contemporary idioms would have it. The notion promoted by Hartley (2003) and other proponents of the “creative industries” model provides an ideological gloss of positivity on media industries. Such perspectives suggest media are inherently bastions of enlightenment, creativity, and abundance, and in opposition to this conception, one might prefer the Horkheimer and Adorno notion of “culture industry” that is more descriptive and critical.

Moreover, on the level of metatheory, the Frankfurt School work preceded the bifurcation of the field of media and communication studies into specialized subareas with competing models and methods. For the Frankfurt School, the study of communication and culture was integrated within critical social theory and became an important part of a theory of contemporary society in which culture and communication were playing ever more significant roles. Hence, despite its limitations, the Frankfurt School theory of the culture industry contains several novel features and makes many important contributions to the study of mass communications and culture. Critical theory conceptualizes culture and communications as part of society and focuses on how socioeconomic imperatives helped constitute the nature, function, and effects of mass communication and culture. By conceptualizing these important cultural and social forces as part of socioeconomic processes, critical theory integrates the study of culture and communication with the study of the economy and society. By adopting a critical approach to the study of all social phenomena, critical theory is able to conceptualize how the culture industry serves as an instrument of social control and thus serves the interests of social domination.

On the whole, later critical approaches to the media and culture within the contemporary academic division of labor tended to separate communications research from the study of mass culture, thus failing to provide a unified account of cultural production, distribution, and reception (see Hammer & Kellner, 2009). Consequently, critical theory is more than a piece of history because it contains a unified and critical approach to the study of culture and communication within the context of critical social theory that engages the political economy of culture and communication, analysis of texts, and the study of audience reception. Likewise, its mode of cultural criticism situates artifacts of analysis within the context of their social environment and uses social theory to help interpret cultural artifacts while using culture to help decipher social trends and processes. The institute's use of psychoanalytic theory leads them to decipher cultural works as exhibiting traits of individual and social psychology as well as sociohistorical content. However, despite its contributions, there are serious limitations to the Frankfurt School model, for much of their criticism of popular culture limits itself to denunciation of its ideological features. Yet because much in popular culture deserves and demands severe condemnation, critical theory ideology critique provides some useful tools for cultural criticism, although it also suffers the limitations mentioned above.

Finally, in an era of media concentration in which giant corporations own media empires that are dedicated to profit and advance the interests of media corporations (McChesney, 2007), the Frankfurt School theory and critique of the culture industry continues to be relevant. Yet Frankfurt School ideology critique tended to focus on the dominant capitalist–bourgeois ideology, and ideology critique today should be expanded to encompass gender, race, sexuality, religion, and other determinants of identities that are often produced in media culture (Kellner, 1995, 2010). Thus while the Frankfurt School critique of the culture industry needs to be expanded and reconstructed, it is still relevant in societies dominated by corporate media and consumer society.

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