Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor W. Adorno

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was one of the most important philosophers and social critics in Germany after World War II. This new translation, based on the text in the complete edition of the works of Max Horkheimer, contains textual variants, commentary upon them, and an editorial discussion of the position of this work in the development of Critical Theory. 'Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.' This paradox is the fundamental thesis of the book. Enlightenment and myth, therefore, are not irreconcilable opposites, but dialectically mediated qualities of both real and intellectual life. They trace enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, back to its mythical roots. Using historical analyses to elucidate the present, they show, against the background of a prehistory of subjectivity, why the National Socialist terror was not an aberration of modern history but was rooted deeply in the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization.Īdorno and Horkheimer see the self-destruction of Western reason as grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the domination of external nature and society. The authors perceive a common element in these phenomena, the tendency toward self-destruction of the guiding criteria inherent in enlightenment thought from the beginning. The various analyses concern such phenomena as the detachment of science from practical life, formalized morality, the manipulative nature of entertainment culture, and a paranoid behavioral structure, expressed in aggressive anti-Semitism, that marks the limits of enlightenment. The book consists in five chapters, at first glance unconnected, together with a number of shorter notes.

Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle against natural forces, as represented in myths, are connected in a wide arch to the most threatening experiences of the present. Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of contemporary events. 'What we had set out to do,' the authors write in the Preface, 'was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.'

Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947.

Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.

Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor W. Adorno