ABSTRACT
It has been over half a century since Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno published Dialectic of Enlightenment. With the passage of time and the continual commodification of culture in America, it seems appropriate to review some of Horkheimer and Adorno’s major theses of the concept of the culture industry to see how they have weathered the cultural debates and the rise of postmodernism in the 1980s and 1990s, when daily life has become so overwhelmingly aestheticized that the particular meanings of community and individual identity have lost all significance. Such a loss allows for the shaping of ethnic and national identities purported to be deeply inbred in their members along with false religious traditions that politicians exploit to increase their power within a system that they cannot really control.
