Preface(i944 and 1947) ideology is exhausted in the idolization of the existing order and of the power by which the technology is controlled. In the discussion of this con- tradiction the culture industry is taken more seriously than it might itself wish to be. But because its appeal to its own commercial character, its con- fession of its diminished truth, has long since become an excuse with hich it evades responsibility for its lies, our analysis is directed at the claim objectively contained in its products to be aesthetic formations and thus representations of truth. It demonstrates the dire state of society by the invalidity of that claim. Still more than the others, the section on the culture industry is fragmentary The discussion, in the form of theses, of"Elements of Anti- Semitism"deals with the reversion of enlightened civilization to barbarism in reality. The not merely theoretical but practical tendency toward self- destruction has been inherent in rationality from the first, not only in the present phase when it is emerging nakedly. For this reason a philosophical prehistory of anti-Semitism is sketched. Its"irrationalism"derives from the nature of the dominant reason and of the world corresponding to its image. The"elements"are directly related to empirical research by the Institute of Social Research, *the foundation set up and kept alive by Felix Weil, without which not only our studies but the good part of the theo- retical work of German emigrants carried forward despite Hitler would not have been possible. We wrote the first three theses jointly with Leo Lowenthal, with whom we have collaborated on many scholarly questions nce the first In the last section we publish notes and sketches which, in part, form part of the ideas in the preceding sections, without having found a place in them, and in part deal provisionally with problems of future work. Most of them relate to a dialectical anthropology. Los Angeles, California, May 1944 The book contains no essential changes to the text completed during the war. Only the last thesis of"Elements of Anti-Semitism"was added sub- Max Horkheimer Theodor W. adorno