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.