Dialectic of Enlightenment

Dialectic of Enlightenment
Author(s)	Max Horkheimer Theodor W. Adorno
Country	Germany
Language	German
Subject(s)	Philosophy Sociology
Publication date	1947
Published in English	1972
Media type	Paperback
Pages	304
ISBN	0804736332
OCLC Number	48851495
Dewey Decimal	193 21
LC Classification	B3279.H8473 P513 2002

Dialectic of Enlightenment (German: Dialektik der Aufklärung), is one of the core texts of Critical Theory explaining the socio-psychological status quo that had been responsible for what the Frankfurt School considered the failure of the Enlightenment. It has had a major effect on 20th century philosophy, sociology, culture, and politics, inspiring especially the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s.

Written by Frankfurt School philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, the book made its first appearance in 1944 under the title Philosophische Fragmente by Social Studies Association, Inc., New York. A revised version was published in 1947 by Querido Verlag in Amsterdam with the title Dialektik der Aufklärung. It was reissued in 1969 by S Fischer Verlag GmbH. There have been two English translations: the first by John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972) and a more recent translation, based on the definitive text from Horkheimer's collected works, by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

Historical context

Part of a series on the
Frankfurt School
Major works
Reason and Revolution The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Eclipse of Reason Dialectic of Enlightenment Minima Moralia Eros and Civilization One-Dimensional Man Negative Dialectics The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere The Theory of Communicative Action
Notable theorists
Max Horkheimer · Theodor Adorno Herbert Marcuse · Walter Benjamin Erich Fromm · Friedrich Pollock Leo Löwenthal · Jürgen Habermas
Important concepts
Critical Theory · Dialectic · Praxis Psychoanalysis · Antipositivism Popular culture · Culture industry Advanced capitalism · Privatism Non-Identity · Communicative Rationality Legitimation Crisis
v · d · e

One of the distinguishing characteristics of the new Critical Theory, as Adorno and Horkheimer tried to elaborate it in Dialectic of Enlightenment, is a certain ambivalence concerning the ultimate source or foundation of social domination, an ambivalence which gave rise to the “pessimism” of the new Critical Theory over the possibility of human emancipation and freedom.^[1] This ambivalence was rooted, of course, in the historical circumstances in which the work was originally produced, in particular, the rise of National Socialism, state capitalism, and mass culture as entirely new forms of social domination that could not be adequately explained within the terms of traditional Critical Theory.^[2]

For Adorno and Horkheimer (relying on the economist Friedrich Pollock’s thesis on National Socialism),^[3] state intervention in the economy had effectively abolished the tension in capitalism between the "relations of production" and "material productive forces of society," a tension which, according to traditional Critical Theory, constituted the primary contradiction within capitalism. The market (as an "unconscious" mechanism for the distribution of goods) and private property had been replaced by centralized planning and socialized ownership of the means of production.^[4]

Yet, contrary to Marx’s famous prediction in the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, this shift did not lead to "an era of social revolution," but rather to fascism and totalitarianism. As such, traditional Critical Theory was left, in Jürgen Habermas’ words, without "anything in reserve to which it might appeal; and when the forces of production enter into a baneful symbiosis with the relations of production that they were supposed to blow wide open, there is no longer any dynamism upon which critique could base its hope."^[5] For Adorno and Horkheimer, this posed the problem of how to account for the apparent persistence of domination in the absence of the very contradiction that, according to traditional Critical Theory, was the source of domination itself.

Content summary

The work contains:

• "The Concept of Enlightenment";
• "Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment"
• "Excursus II: Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality"
• "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" (in which they prefigure Marshall McLuhan's thesis that "the medium is the message")
• "Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment"
• "Notes and Drafts"

Themes

The problems posed by the rise of fascism with the demise of the liberal state and the market (together with the failure of a social revolution to materialize in its wake), constitute the theoretical and historical perspective that frames the overall argument of the book – the two theses that “Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.”^[6] The history of human societies, as well as that of the formation of individual ego or self, is re-evaluated from the standpoint of what Horkheimer and Adorno perceived at the time as the ultimate outcome of this history: the collapse or “regression” of reason, with the rise of National Socialism, into something resembling the very forms of superstition and myth out of which reason had supposedly emerged as a result of historical progress or development.

To characterize this history, Horkheimer and Adorno draw on a wide variety of material, including the philosophical anthropology contained in Marx’s early writings, centered on the notion of “labor,” Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals (and the emergence of conscience through the renunciation of the will to power), Freud’s account in Totem and Taboo of the emergence of civilization and law in murder of the primordial father,^[7] ethnological research on magic and ritual in primitive societies,^[8] as well myth criticism, philology and literary analysis.

See also

• Counter-Enlightenment
• Das Kapital

External links

• Entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Excerpts from the Dialectic

Notes

1. ^ Adorno, T. W., with Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. 242.
2. ^ "Critical Theory was initially developed in Horkheimer’s circle to think through political disappointments at the absence of revolution in the West, the development of Stalinism in Soviet Russia, and the victory of fascism in Germany. It was supposed to explain mistaken Marxist prognoses, but without breaking Marxist intentions." "The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Horkheimer and Adorno." in Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. trans. Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. 116. Also, see Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory, trans. Benjamin Gregg (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1985).
3. ^ Willem van Reijen and Jan Bransen. "The Disappearance of Class History in the Dialectic of Enlightenment." in Dialectic of Enlightenment. 248. Also see, Friedrich Pollock. "Is National Socialism a New Order?" Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941), 453.
4. ^ "[G]one are the objective laws of the market which ruled in the actions of the entrepreneurs and tended toward catastrophe. Instead the conscious decision of the managing directors executes as results (which are more obligatory than the blindest price-mechanisms) the old law of value and hence the destiny of capitalism." Dialectic of Enlightenment. p. 38.
5. ^ "The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment," p. 118.
6. ^ Dialectic of Enlightenment, xviii
7. ^ See Dialectic of Enlightenment, 7, 159, 162.
8. ^ Dialectic of Enlightenment, 10, 256.