The Institute’s cultural turn stayed within its earlier Marxist political commitment.

Evidence

It would be a mistake to interpret the Institut’s shifting of focus from base to superstructure as an abandonment of its commitment to the ideals of its earlier period. The decline of traditional, “negative” culture was not a matter for intellectuals alone. Mass culture was the seed-bed of political totalitarianism. The mediating mechanisms between culture and politics were best understood, so Horkheimer and those around him felt, in psychosocial terms. Their studies of popular culture were thus connected with the investigations of the authoritarian potential in America that they conducted in the forties. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 653

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The Marxist will to master history remains indispensable even in the postmodern moment — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 739

Broader Connections

• The Marxist will to master history remains indispensable even in the postmodern moment #expands (0.82) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 739