Re-visiting The History of Consumerism: The Emergence of Mass Consumer Culture as a Distinctive Feature of Capitalist Societies

Abstract

The Frankfurt School was the first school to discern the roles of the media in shaping human thought, influencing politics, and increasing the insatiable demand of consumers in capitalist societies. The analysis brought to the fore by Adorno and Horkheimer regarding the ‘Culture Industry’ illustrated a model of media as tools of hegemony and social control advanced by Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Jurgen Habermas. The School also examined the repercussions of mass culture and the rise of the consumer society on the proletariat that was aimed to be the instrument of revolution in the classical Marxian scenario. Another thing that was analyzed is how the culture industries and consumer society were considered as stabilizing forces of contemporary capitalism. Therefore, they were among the first to see the expansion of communication and mass media roles in politics, socialization and social life, culture, and the construction of docile subjects as Foucault puts it. In the present article, I review the contributions to media and social theory advanced by the Frankfurt School. The integration of psychoanalysis, aesthetic theory and the critique of mass culture, and the critique of the Enlightenment are the main components discussed in the present article.