He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the works of Freud, Marx, and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society. As a critic of both fascism and what he called the culture industry, his writings—such as "Dialectic of Enlightenment" (1947), "Minima Moralia" (1951) and "Negative Dialectics" (1966)—strongly influenced the European New Left.