In his essay "Culture Industry Reconsidered" (1975), Theodor Adorno recalls that Max Horkheimer and he first coined the term "culture industry" in their book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972; first published in Amsterdam in 1947). The specific reference is to an essay entitled "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Adorno points out that in early drafts of the essay they used the term "mass culture" but eventually replaced it with "culture industry" in order to "exclude from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises from the masses themselves" (p. 12). Instead, Horkheimer and Adorno used the term to describe a commodified and industrialized culture, managed from above and essentially produced for the sake of making profits.

In "The Culture Industry," Horkheimer and Adorno laid out the basic framework for the study of culture...