In 1954 Adorno wrote, "if one were to condense what the ideology of mass culture comes down to into a single sentence, one would have to represent it with the parodic statement: “become what you are.” Adorno offered a series of important lectures on the concept of ideology with Max Horkheimer in the wake of the Second World War. They argued against the liberal sociologists such as Mannheim and Weber's conceptions of ideology, and they also called for a new Marxist understanding of ideology.

In this episode, we discuss the history of the concept of ideology up to Adorno's important intervention. This conversation is based on a newly translated article "Contribution to the Theory of Ideology" by Adorno and translated by our guest Jacob Bard-Rosenberg. Dr. Rosenberg has recently completed a Ph.D. on Adorno and Benjamin on memory, forgetting and dreams. You can download his dissertation here. To read Rosenberg's review of Adorno's article on ideology, please go here.