英语论文网

ed powerful analyses of the changes in Western capitalist societies that occurred since the classical theory of Marx. Kellner Douglas stats that while working at the institute fur sozialforschung in Frankfurt, Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s, theorists such as Max Horkheimer, T. W Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, and Erich Fromm produced some of the first accounts within critical social theory of the importance of mass culture and communication in social reproduction and domination. The Frankfurt School also generated one of the first models of critical cultural studies that analyze the processes of cultural production and political economy, the politics of cultural texts, and audience reception and use of cultural artifacts (Kellner 1989 & 1995). According to Steven Best(retrieved 2010), the Frankfurt School abandoned the historical, positivist, and disciplinary outlook of mainstream philosophy and social science in favor of a historical, critical, and inter-disciplinary approach that analyzed the interrelationships among culture, technology, and the capitalist economy. Frankfurt School theorists synthesized political economy, sociology, history, and philosophy, with the first modern ‘cultural studies’ that analyzed the social and ideological effects of mass culture and communications. Against staid, pseudo-objective forms of ‘traditional theory’ the Frankfurt School developed a ‘critical theory’ distinguished by its practical and radical objective, namely, to emancipate human beings from conditions of domination. Steve Best states that recognizing the limitations of ‘orthodox’ or ‘classical’ Marxism, Frankfurt theorists developed a ‘neo-Marxist’ orientation that retained basic Marxist theoretical and political premises, but supplemented the critique of capitalism with other perspectives, thereby spawning hybrid theories such as Freudo -Marxism, Marxist-feminism, and Marxist-existentialism (Kellner Douglas , 1989)

 

According to Keller (1995), moving from Nazi Germany to the United States, the Frankfurt School experienced at first hand the rise of a media culture involving film, popular music, radio, television, and other forms of mass culture (Wiggershaus 1994). According to Steven Best, the menacing rise of Hitler and Nazism that made Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse fled Germany and settled in the United States. According to Steven Best, in the United States, where they found themselves in exile, media production was by and large a form of commercial entertainment controlled by big corporations. They analyzed how the US itself was becoming totalitarian with the rise of state-monopoly capitalism and the role played by mass culture and ideology in stabilizing crisis tendencies and shaping consent to domination. Moving from the control of production to the management of consumption, from the workplace to the home space and everyday life, capitalism had penetrated virtually all aspects of society and personal existence. Against the nightmarish backdrop of world wars, totalitarian communism, fascism, monopoly capitalism, new forms of social control, and the cooptation of the working class, Frankfurt School theorists were understandably pessimistic (Steve Best, retrieved 2010)). Steven Best states that two of its key theorists Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno developed an account of th本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。