Why intellectuals love Disney
This month marks the 100th anniversary of Walt Disney’s company. The first cartoons it was founded to produce – the animation/live-action shorts Alice Comedies – are largely forgotten, eclipsed not least by the resounding success of Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse grabbed much of the attention from the get-go, including that of several philosophers, sociologists and critical theorists, who perceived in him an emblem of the best and worst of the modern age. Also celebrating its 100th anniversary this year is the founding text of western Marxism, Georg Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness. A generation of disaffected, bourgeois intellectuals, adherents of what came to be known as the Frankfurt School (100
