Frankfurt School / Critical Theory

The Institute for Social Research, founded Frankfurt 1923, exiled to New York 1934, returned 1951. Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Benjamin, later Habermas. Fused Marx with Freud and Weber to produce a theory of domination that operates through culture rather than only through economics.

The central instrument for Renaissance 3.0 is the CULTURE INDUSTRY thesis from Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944): mass culture standardises and manufactures pseudo-individuality, the appearance of choice concealing identical product.

DIFFERENTIATOR from psychefacturing: Adorno and Horkheimer describe what happens to taste and consciousness, and their mechanism is passive reception. Psychefacturing describes what happens to CHARACTER, and its mechanism is active identity work. Their consumer is duped. The psychefactured self is a participant in its own manufacture. False consciousness versus voluntary self-production.

· 1923– · active · influence 9/10