Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

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Stanford University Press, Mar 27, 2002 - Social Science - 304 pages
This new translation of the Frankfurt School’s seminal text includes textual variants and discussion of the work’s influence on Critical Theory.

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. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer trace a wide arch that connects the birth of Western history—and of subjectivity itself—to the most threatening experiences of the present. 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.

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 show why the National Socialist terror was not an aberration of modern history but was rooted deeply in the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization.

From inside the book

Contents

Preface to the New Edition 1969
The Concept of Enlightenment
Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment
Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality
Enlightenment as Mass Deception
Limits of Enlightenment
Notes and Sketches
Editors Afterword The Position of Dialectic
The Disappearance of Class History in Dialectic
Cultural Memory in the Present
Copyright

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Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno were two influential members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.

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