Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical FragmentsThis 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
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... economic and political circumstances is a task which, for objective and subjective reasons, we are unable to perform today. We are therefore happy that the fragment is appearing in a series devoted predominantly to philosophical ...
... economic and political circumstances is a task which, for objective and subjective reasons, we are unable to perform today. We are therefore happy that the fragment is appearing in a series devoted predominantly to philosophical ...
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... economic productivity which creates the conditions for a more just world also affords the technical apparatus and the social groups controlling it a disproportionate advantage over the rest of the population. The individual is entirely ...
... economic productivity which creates the conditions for a more just world also affords the technical apparatus and the social groups controlling it a disproportionate advantage over the rest of the population. The individual is entirely ...
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... economic achievements into their opposite. Under the given circumstances the gifts of fortune themselves become elements of misfortune. If, in the absence of the social subject, the volume of goods took the form of so-called ...
... economic achievements into their opposite. Under the given circumstances the gifts of fortune themselves become elements of misfortune. If, in the absence of the social subject, the volume of goods took the form of so-called ...
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... economy both in factories and on the battlefield, it is at the disposal of entrepreneurs regardless of their origins. Kings control technology no more directly than do merchants: it is as democratic as the economic system* with which it ...
... economy both in factories and on the battlefield, it is at the disposal of entrepreneurs regardless of their origins. Kings control technology no more directly than do merchants: it is as democratic as the economic system* with which it ...
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... economic apparatus endows commodities with the values which decide the behavior of people. Since, with the ending of free exchange, commodities have forfeited all economic qualities except their fetish character, this character has ...
... economic apparatus endows commodities with the values which decide the behavior of people. Since, with the ending of free exchange, commodities have forfeited all economic qualities except their fetish character, this character has ...
Contents
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 | |
Common terms and phrases
Adorno advertising already animals anti-Semitism become behavior blind bourgeois capitalism Christianity civilization commodity compulsion concept consciousness contradiction Critical Theory critique culture industry Dialectic of Enlightenment domination economic edition element everything expression fascism fate fear film finally Frankfurt am Main freedom Friedrich Pollock function German Gesammelte Schriften Hays Office Homer Horkheimer Horkheimer's human Ibid idea identity ideology individual intellectual Jews judgment Juliette knowledge labor language liberal logic longer magic material Max Horkheimer means mediated merely mimesis monopoly moral myth mythical nature Nietzsche object Odysseus Odysseus’s once one’s organized philosophy pleasure political posthumous papers powerlessness praxis prehistory principle production rackets radio rational reality reason reflection relationship religion replaced represented rulers sacrifice Sade self-preservation social society sphere subjugated takes tendency terror Theodor W theoretical things thought totalitarian truth unity universal victim violence whole Wilamowitz word