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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... truth instead of contrasting truth as something invariable to the movement of history. The book was written at a time when the end of the National Socialist terror was in sight. In not a few places, however, the formulation is no longer ...
... truth instead of contrasting truth as something invariable to the movement of history. The book was written at a time when the end of the National Socialist terror was in sight. In not a few places, however, the formulation is no longer ...
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... truth evaporates. Today, however, motorized history is rushing ahead of such intellectual developments, and the official spokesmen, who have other concerns, are liquidating the theory to which they owe their place in the sun* before it ...
... truth evaporates. Today, however, motorized history is rushing ahead of such intellectual developments, and the official spokesmen, who have other concerns, are liquidating the theory to which they owe their place in the sun* before it ...
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... truth which petrifies enlightenment itself. Both these terms, enlightenment and truth, are to be understood as pertaining not merely to intellectual history but also to current reality. Just as enlightenment expresses the real movement ...
... truth which petrifies enlightenment itself. Both these terms, enlightenment and truth, are to be understood as pertaining not merely to intellectual history but also to current reality. Just as enlightenment expresses the real movement ...
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... truth, has long since become an excuse with which it evades responsibility for its lies, our analysis is directed at the claim objectively contained in its products to be aesthetic formations and thus representations of truth. It ...
... truth, has long since become an excuse with which it evades responsibility for its lies, our analysis is directed at the claim objectively contained in its products to be aesthetic formations and thus representations of truth. It ...
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... truth,” but “operation,” the effective procedure. The “true end, scope or office of knowledge” does not consist in “any plausible, delectable, reverend or admired discourse, or any satisfactory arguments, but in effecting and working ...
... truth,” but “operation,” the effective procedure. The “true end, scope or office of knowledge” does not consist in “any plausible, delectable, reverend or admired discourse, or any satisfactory arguments, but in effecting and working ...
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