The problems posed by the rise of fascism with the demise of the liberal state and the market (together with the failure of a social revolution to materialize in its wake), constitute the theoretical and historical perspective that frames the overall argument of the book – the two theses that “Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.”^[6] The history of human societies, as well as that of the formation of individual ego or self, is re-evaluated from the standpoint of what Horkheimer and Adorno perceived at the time as the ultimate outcome of this history: the collapse or “regression” of reason, with the rise of National Socialism, into something resembling the very forms of superstition and myth out of which reason had supposedly emerged as a result of historical progress or development.

To characterize this history, Horkheimer and Adorno draw on a wide variety of material, including the philosophical anthropology contained in Marx’s early writings, centered on the notion of “labor;” Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals(and the emergence of conscience through the renunciation of the will to power); Freud’s account in Totem and Taboo of the emergence of civilization and law in murder of the primordial father;^[7] ethnological research on magic and ritual in primitive societies;^[8] as well as myth criticism, philology and literary analysis.

The authors coined the term culture industry, arguing that in a capitalist society mass culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods — films, radio programmes, magazines, etc.^[9] These homogenized cultural products are used to manipulate mass society into docility and passivity.^[10] The introduction of the radio, a mass medium, no longer permits its listener any mechanism of reply, as was the case with the telephone. Instead, listeners are not subjects anymore but passive receptacles exposed "in authoritarian fashion to the same programs put out by different stations