"Dialectic of Enlightenment" is undoubtedly the most influential
publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Written
during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared
in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. "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."
Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of contemporary
events. 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.
The book consists in five chapters, at first glance unconnected,
together with a number of shorter notes. 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 authors perceive a common element in these phenomena, the
tendency toward self-destruction of the guiding criteria inherent
in enlightenment thought from the beginning. 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.
Adorno 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. They trace
enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, back to its
mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth, therefore, are not
irreconcilable opposites, but dialectically mediated qualities of
both real and intellectual life. "Myth is already enlightenment,
and enlightenment reverts to mythology." This paradox is the
fundamental thesis of the book.
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.
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