ABSTRACT
Jürgen Habermas is a prominent German critical philosopher and sociologist who, as a research assistant to the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno in the 1950s, joined the so-called Frankfurt School of German critical theory. The Frankfurt School refers to a group of German social theorists (e.g., Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse) who founded the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) in 1925 at the University of Frankfurt/Main in Germany for analyzing the changes in Western capitalist societies with reference to the classical theory of Karl Marx (Wiggershaus, 2001). They developed a critical social theory for a very practical purpose: “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” (Horkheimer, 1982, p. 244). The members of the Frankfurt School analyzed the system of cultural production dominated by lm, radio broadcasting, newspapers, and magazines (e.g., Horkheimer & Adorno, 1972). Their point was that mass media, controlled by advertising and commercial imperatives, serve the needs of dominant corporate interests and play a major role in ideological reproduction in creating subservience to the system of consumer capitalism. The output of the Frankfurt school included
several critical cultural studies dealing with processes of cultural production (Kellner, 1989, 1995).
