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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... production. They have changed no less than the ideology they attacked. They suffer the fate which has always been reserved for triumphant thought. If it voluntarily leaves behind its critical element to become a mere means in the ...
... production. They have changed no less than the ideology they attacked. They suffer the fate which has always been reserved for triumphant thought. If it voluntarily leaves behind its critical element to become a mere means in the ...
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... production and dissemination; the specific content of the ideology is exhausted in the idolization of the existing order and of the power by which the technology is controlled. In the discussion of this contradiction the culture ...
... production and dissemination; the specific content of the ideology is exhausted in the idolization of the existing order and of the power by which the technology is controlled. In the discussion of this contradiction the culture ...
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... produce neither concepts nor images, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labor of others,* capital. The “many things” which, according to Bacon, knowledge still held in store are themselves mere instruments ...
... produce neither concepts nor images, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labor of others,* capital. The “many things” which, according to Bacon, knowledge still held in store are themselves mere instruments ...
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... production of goods that can be bought on the market. Each human being has been endowed with a self of his or her own, different from all others, so that it could all the more surely be made the same. But because that self never quite ...
... production of goods that can be bought on the market. Each human being has been endowed with a self of his or her own, different from all others, so that it could all the more surely be made the same. But because that self never quite ...
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... The countless agencies of mass production and its culture* impress standardized behavior on the individual as the only natural, decent, and rational one. Individuals define themselves now only as things, statistical elements, successes.
... The countless agencies of mass production and its culture* impress standardized behavior on the individual as the only natural, decent, and rational one. Individuals define themselves now only as things, statistical elements, successes.
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