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Not long ago, the critical theory of social philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer achieved an almost canonical status in scholarly interpretations of leisure culture in the twentieth century. "Under late capitalism is the prolongation of work" they wrote in Dialectic of Enlightenment, published first in Amsterdam in 1947 but then reissued more than twenty years later at the height of the European student protest movement. Leisure was an "from the mechanized work process" but it was an escape whose content and form was so indelibly stamped by the exigencies of capitalist production that one's "are inevitably after-images of the work process itself" "happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one's leisure time." These passages occurred in a more elaborated analysis of the so-called "industry" the name for which captured the philosophers' larger point that time spent away from labor was inextricably caught by the demands of mass production and mass consumption. On both sides of the Atlantic, this approach not only shaped much New Left thinking about late modern society, most notably in countercultural classics such as Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man and Eros and Civilization, but also later left its mark on the emergent field of "studies."

The historical moment in which Horkheimer and Adorno wrote explains something of the sharp despair with which they castigated modern society. Exiled from his position as founder and director of the famous Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Horkheimer joined Adorno in Los Angeles during World War II to write most of Dialectic of Enlightenment. It is unsurprising in this context that the uprooted scholars focused on American cinema and radio to demonstrate how reverted to ideology, and how the modern media, organized around principles of mass production, had come to perpetrate "deception" on consumers. But what is striking is how comprehensive their analysis was: "bombs, and movies keep the whole thing together" they remarked.  In their perspective, the world of leisure, whether symbolized by the motorized hordes of Sunday drivers and vacationers, or by the movie-going audiences in southern California cinemas, was directly continuous with the world of capitalist production. That capitalism was now producing more bombs than cars was only an accident of the historical situation. Indeed, for Horkheimer and Adorno, Hitler, Mussolini, and their many imitators were not products of militarism or war as such, but rather specific European manifestations of a deeper trend in industrial society. Politics, leisure, popular culture, music, cinema, tourism, advertising, shopping, consumer society - all bore the indelible mark of the social hierarchy that manipulated them, that obliterated the last traces of criticism or at least of a tragic worldview, and that finally subsumed everything in a totalitarian system of capitalist domination. In contrast to those who argued that the dissolution of religion and growing bureaucratic specialization had fragmented social experience, Adorno and Horkheimer argued that an impressive degree of coherence existed in society "now impresses the same stamp on everything" they claimed. Movie simply provided the requisite advertising to further the totalitarian colonization of everyday life. . .

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