The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (Routledge Classics) Paperback – 17 May 2001

Excellent on all counts!

What can you say about a guy who thought Walt Disney was the most dangerous man in the United States? Gotta love Theodor Adorno. As a philosophy major, I find his work fascinating. He's one of the reasons (just one) that I don't have a television and I can't stand network or cable television. There is a Culture Industry out there, and (if you've studied Karl Marx, as have I) you know that governments and power structures spawn their own ideologies, and they play 24/7 on television broadcasts. Seriously, one reason I hate going to the doctor's office (just one) is the television set mounted over the waiting room. Free yourself and free your minds. Read Adorno. And throw your television set out the window. (Or, I should say, recycle it responsibly).

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0415253802/ref=cm_cr_ryp_prd_ttl_sol_19still unread - I ordered the wrong text book!! cannot comment

Good book.

In our banal age when sanctimonious platitude is often mistaken for wisdom or even ethical character, Adorno's mercilessly uncompromising analyses of the controlling nature of mass culture may initially strike some of us as exaggerated or hysterical initially. After all most of us now bear the consequence of lengthy habituation to our socio-economic situation: a chronic semi-conscious, autopilot behavioral and perceptive mode that can comprehend only the pre-digested, repetitive ideas or ways of thinking. However, once we start reading Adorno more attentively and thoughtfully we realize how prescient and perspicacious Adorno was as a critic of our modern society and culture. Many of his thoughts articulated in this volume anticipate the thoughts and writings of our leading contemporary thinkers, such as Jean Baudrillard, Frederic Jameson, and even Noam Chomsky (although he probably disagrees with Adorno's attitude toward culture, which may be construed as elitist).I highly recommend this book to anybody who wants to escape the mass-culture induced stupor to become a more conscious human and citizen.

The essays vary in relevance and insight. While there are some brilliant remarks on the use of "free time" in capitalist economies, one cannot help but notice Adorno's overall snobbish tone. It speaks to what "Marxism" became in some intellectual circles after the war when its primary interest is in pointing out the vapidity of jazz and Toscanini fans.