This volume focuses on developing a theory of culture that reveals how ideas create and legitimize social inequality, using empirical case studies ranging from automobile design to architecture to compare and critique two of the most influential theories of culture in contemporary sociology. It questions to what extent our culture reflects class inequality, and to what extent our culture masks those inequalities through the sameness of unified mass culture.

Culture, Class, and Critical Theory develops a theory of culture that explains how ideas create and legitimate class inequalities in modern society. This theory is developed through a critique and comparison of the powerful ideas on culture offered by Pierre Bourdieu and the Frankfurt School thinkers, especially Theodor Adorno. These ideas are illuminated and criticized through the development of two empirical cases on which Gartman has published extensively, automobile design and architecture. Bourdieu and the Frankfurt School postulate opposite theories of the cultural legitimation of class inequalities. Bourdieu argues that the culture of modern society is a class culture, a ranked diversity of beliefs and tastes corresponding to different classes. The cultural beliefs and practices of the dominant class are arbitrarily defined as superior, thus legitimating its greater share of social resources. By contrast, the thinkers of the Frankfurt School conceive of modern culture as a mass culture, a leveled homogeneity in which the ideas and tastes shared by all classes disguises real class inequalities. This creates the illusion of an egalitarian democracy that prevents inequalities from being contested. Through an empirical assessment of the theories against the cases, Gartman reveals that both are correct, but for different parts of modern culture. These parts combine to provide a strong legitimation of class inequalities.

Examines the field of cultural studies and argues for its relevance in addressing the enormous impact of popular culture and mass media today. Among the perspectives analysed are the Marxist sociology of culture and poststructural/postmodern analysis

First Published in 2008. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Considering Class offers international, interdisciplinary perspectives on class analysis today. It explores the gap between the class forces shaping the world and the paucity of class-consciousness at a popular level. The book shows the importance of the cultural struggle.

These essays, written in the 1930s and 1940s, represent a first selection in English from the major work of the founder of the famous Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Horkheimer's writings are essential to an understanding of the intellectual background of the New Left and the to much current social-philosophical thought, including the work of Herbert Marcuse. Apart from their historical significance and even from their scholarly eminence, these essays contain an immediate relevance only now becoming fully recognized.

A reader on popular culture