The dominion of influence

“Advertising today is a negative principle, a blocking device: everything that does not bear its stamp is economically suspect… advertising for its own sake (is) a pure representation of social power.” Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002, pp. 131–132)In her excellent book, Business as Usual: How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century, Caroline Jack (2024) details how business, government, and the advertising industries worked together to sell capitalism to US citizens through various forms of “economic education” media during the twentieth century’s tumultuous decades. Industry and government employed the enthusiastic help of professional organizations like the Advertising Council, she writes, to manage their anxieties about the unpredictability of democracy by influencing Americans to see capitalism and private enterprise as moral virtues, synonymous with freedom and national identity.