Sigmund Freud
Adorno devotes an entire chapter to Sigmund Freud and even gives the essay included in this collection his name as an essential element: “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda.” The thrust of the essay essentially transfers Freudian concepts from the individual to mass culture with the implication that fascist ideology was simmering in a repressive milieu within the collective unconscious as latent tendencies before the rise of leaders in the 1930’s manipulated and exploited those tendencies into the mainstream as acceptable elements of cultural sensibilities.
Adolf Hitler
Wherever you have essays discussing cultural manipulation and fascism, you can bet you will have references to Hitler. Hitler is here situated as little more than a rabble rouser whose real impact was in promoting an “atmosphere of irrational emotional aggressiveness” into the cultural mainstream until it was adopted by the masses as the prevailing ideological response to everything.
Gustave Le Bon
Le Bon is an important figure in the history of psychology who precedes Freud and upon whose work Freud built and expanded. Le Bon is established as the progenitor of study and insight into what would eventually be labeled “the psychology of the masses.” His underlying thesis that drives Adorno’s analysis is his most famous observation of this psychology: once a crowd begins to collectively respond in irrational ways, they always go directly to the extremes and transform into a mob.
Karl Marx
The Marxist dialectic that capitalist ideology based on unfair distribution of wealth and inequitable relations of production will inevitably result in a socialist revolution both informs Adorno’s construct of the culture industry and provides him with his main point of contention. For Adorno, the natural extension of capitalism is not socialist revolution, but fascist assimilation and this assimilation results directly from the influence of cultural institutions which are governed by capitalist economic control.
Daniel Defoe
The author of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders is depicted by Adorno as a key figure in the creation of marketing artistic creations and the development of what came to be known as the “mass market.” Defoe is portrayed as a writer who specifically chose topics to write about as the result of a conscious calculation of what the audience wanted. From this commodification of the art of literary creation which allowed for a certain leeway of creativity since Defoe could only go on hunches has developed the mass market strategizing of subject matter based on focus groups, data mining and the concept of franchising and tent-poling.
