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Editorial Review Book Description
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. ... Read more Customer Reviews (11) 
Nothing short of revolutionary
Marxist politics aside, Adorno and Horkheimer's staggering critique of post-enlightenment thought takes everything we "civilized" people take for granted and burns it---in front of your kids.
The examination of the oft-overlooked philosophy of the Marquis de Sade is especially significant, as it critiques the rogue philosopher while paying him his long-overdue respect as a true man of philosophy.
Adorno presents a challenging look at the modern condition
Adorno and Horkheimer are associated with the Frankfurt school of thought in post-WWII Germany.In this book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, the two thinkers disect the post-war condition looking at all aspects of cultural identity as based on ancient enlightenment-esque ideals.This book illuminates the devestating results of progressivist models of history in late capitalism.Probably the most famous essay deals with the culture industry and how, in post-war capitalism, movies, books, television all become tools of subjegation through which a falsified sense of individuality is produced and commodified to the ends of keeping the consumers of this industry distracted enough to ignore the insideousness of that which we allow to control us.
A very dense read, poetic in areas, but challenging throughout.Adorno is often criticized for being a cynic, but I think that under his often scathing view of modern culture is a message that through exacting self-reflection change of the "total system" can occur.
These themes are expanded on in Adorno's other works: Minima Moralia, and Negative Dialectic.
Gather the Fragments...
"Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts back to mythology" (xviii).This statement is likely one of the most explosive philosphical theses penned in the 20th century, for not only did it give expression to much of the suspicion and pessimism that people experienced in the early 20th century, particularly under the Nazi regime, but this statement set into motion much of the later suspicion concerning the Enlightenment project and its relation to not just freedom, but domination under freedom's guise.
Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments is the most important work ever written by any of the members of the Frankfurt School; it stands as a type of manifesto really for the possibility of Critical Theory as a post-positivistic discipline.It is easy to miss, but this is not just a work of philosophy - it is not a work written by old men with elbow patches on their jackets pondering various ideas in a scientific and socio-historical philosophical vacuum.Quite the opposite: this is a book that drew upon then-current sociology and anthropology (particularly pertaining to religion), in addition to the history of philosophy and philosophical currents such as Marxism (Western Marxism, to be specific).This is a book that draws - obviously - on history; it is a book that has much to say about media and the effects of what Adorno called "The Culture Industry".
Several authors, such as Jurgen Habermas and Leszek Kolakowski, have noted the the structure of the book - what we might call its "poetics" - is quite abnormal for a work of philosophy.The subtitle of the book comes well into play here as a means of understanding the book; "Philosophical Fragments" very much describes what it is like reading this work.The genuinely fragmentary nature of the book - it begins with an essay titled "The Concept of Enlightenment" before two excurses (one on Odysseus and the other on Marquis de Sade), the chapter "The Culture Industry", a series of theses titled "Elements of Angi-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment", and the closing section "Notes and Sketches" (which is anything but smooth) - only adds to the sense of urgency.
The attempt to ascertain "why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism" (xiv) animates the work.This regression ultimately has to do with the very nature of myth, which is "obscure and luminous at once" (xvii).It is with positivism that science believes it can banish all mystery from the world such that humans become masters of it (1); art itself has fallen prey to this myth (14).Perhaps surprisingly, this does not begin in the 18th century European Enlightenment, but with one of our most ancient of founding myths: Odysseus.The deceptive nature of the sacrifice in Odysseus is the beginning of our journey towards enlightenment, for it places us on a similar footing with the gods.The attempt of persons such as Sade to advocate a world without superstition not only turns us into beasts with "the innocence of wild animals" (77), but means that we still must hold onto one myth: that we can actually live in a world where all is entirely as it seems.Transgression of the previous morality (Catholicism) is the necessary mythical supplement to this view; it brings no pleasure but only violence.Both the Culture Industry and Anti-Semitism ultimately have the same totalitarian goal: to make everyone the same, as economic cogs in the machine, devoid of their individuality.Thus Enlightenment is necessarily violent against the Other, who doesn't fit in.The book ends with Notes and Sketches in a kind of anti-climax; Dialectic of Enlightenment is left open.
In many ways, this edition by Stanford University Press, in their uber-fine series "Cultural Memory in the Present", is like a critical edition in English.Dialectic of Enlightenment was printed various times and in various editions from 1944 thru 1969; this edition collects each of the prefaces for the various editions, and notes every single textual variant for each edition, some of which are seen as rather unimportant, but others of which show that the text was very much a continual work in progress for Horkheimer and Adorno.In addition to an Editor's Afterword, there is an essay appended at the end of the book titled "The Disappearance of Class History in "Dialectic of Enlightenment": A Commentary on the Textual Variants (1944 and 1947)", which many will likely to find insightful reading.This is an important addition to the library of many different fields - political thought, intellectual history, philosophy, theology, religious studies, and social theory, among others - regardless of how it has been produced.Stanford University Press should really be commended for producing it in such a way that it is a fine addition to one's library as well.
One does well to remember that this work should not be simply taken at face value.In their 1969 Preface, Horkheimer and Adorno mention that they ascribe a "temporal core to truth" (xi), which means that as an older text, what remains applicable in it should be used today, and what no longer applies should be left alone as having been applicable at one time in the past.Neither author ever endorsed the irresponsible usage of their work in the 1960s by protesting students who had become little more than mobs; that they have been linked to irresponsible New Left anti-politics (via their friend Herbert Marcuse) is not their fault.Rather, what Horkheimer and Adorno endorsed then (and would continue to endorse, were they still alive) is not a brutal application of a particular theory, but a sustained, thoughtful and well informed engagement of theory with the whole of the modern world."As a critique of philosophy, it does not seek to abandon philosophy itself" (xii).In short, they believed in wisdom: and this is what philosophy is ultimately all about.
A masterpiece of critical theory
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, both prominents of the Frankfurter Schule of critical theory, wrote this work during WWII. In their own words, the purpose of the book was to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism. Obviously their experiences as Jewish intellectuals fleeing for the national-socialist regime to the United States was a strong impulse for this view, but the book is not limited to a critique of nazism or even totalitarianism altogether.
The main subject of the book, though that itself is already difficult to disentangle, is Enlightenment's betrayal of its own liberating capacity. Adorno & Horkheimer analyze this by means of various cultural metaphors, which in highly abstract, contradictory and aesthetic language (especially the parts by Adorno) trace the development of Enlightenment and its subsequent 'dark side' throughout an equally metaphorical history of culture and ideas. In a certain sense this may most remind readers not familiar with both authors of Foucault and his use of concepts like the Panopticon to express a view of power relations. The method of Adorno and Horkheimer is however not so much genealogical, as Foucault's is, as dialectical in its idealist form.
The book consists of an introduction, two "excursions" and two chapters on the Enlightenment itself, as well as a series of aphorisms provided at the end as "notes and sketches". Each part of the book consists of a very abstract, very metaphysical and almost entrancing analysis of, in turn, the development of Enlightenment as myth out of earlier myth, the form of modern Enlightenment as instrumental reason and mass deception, and the limits of Enlightenment to its own rationality, in the form of anti-semitism. The language of the book is extremely difficult, even in English, and in the best (and worst) traditions of continental philosophy it contains a very great amount of layers and meanings, not all of which are free of internal contradiction. Readers familiar to Situationist works are perhaps best prepared for the effect, which is somewhat similar in method, if not in style, to Guy Debord.
The introduction, "The Concept of Enlightenment", posits Enlightenment as thought liberating man from his natural shackles, and creating man as master of the earth. This process of liberation entails at the same time the possibility of man to protect himself from, and understand the workings of, nature, and also mankind's loss of being one with nature. In this process, the self is created as a subjectivity divorced from direct experience of the outside world. Man's memory of this is very vague and distant, but is present in everyone as a certain inchoate feeling of loss.
This is also the main subject of the first Exkurs, "Odysseus, or Myth and Enlightenment". The story of the Odysseia is here used in many ways to provide metaphorical expressions for the role of myth in and against Enlightenment. Myths are primitive descriptions of the world, and in being so are already classifications used as a form of instrumental reason, which is the seed of Enlightenment. The role of sacrifice to the Gods, for example, is presented as manipulation of those Gods, and in so doing already expression of an Enlightened mind avant la lettre. Odysseus' adventure with the Sirens is metaphor for man's loss as described above: Odysseus, the Enlightened ruler, knows his loss but is constrained by his knowledge from acting on it; and the shipmates, the great mass of modernity, is only vaguely aware of the loss, and are not affected. But Circe, the Cyclops, and many other themes are used besides.
The second Exkurs is "Juliette, or Enlightenment and Morality". The works of De Sade, in particular Juliette, here provide an expression of Enlightenments freeing and therefore contradictory character. Kant is contrasted with Juliette; where Kant is the restrained form of reason, reason as classifying and ordening power, Juliette is reason's destructive power of old orders. Because Enlightenment destroys the validity of any appeal to tradition, religion, etc., it falls pray to itself, in that Enlightenment's appeal to its own absolute values is undermined, in the same way that Juliette uses and is used by Catholicism in undermining it.
The third chapter is "Enlightenment as Mass Deception", covering the subject of the culture industry. Here Adorno rants against all the vapid and degraded culture forms he perceives in the United States, although he never states it as valid only for the US, of course. There are many interesting insights and observations about modern culture and still valid ones too in this chapter, but Adorno's general tone is that of the "hochbürgerliche" bourgeois annoyed about the offenses against good taste he sees. Yet to dismiss it based on that would be superficial, even if we cannot agree with Adorno's hatred for radio and jazz. His observations on American movies are very poignant, and in between his cultural criticism he hits on certain relations between the capitalist mode of production, its Enlightenment ideology, and the cultural superstructure that are very worthwhile for a patient radical.
The fourth chapter is called "Limits of Enlightenment", and addresses directly the subject of anti-semitism and fascism more generally. Fascism is posited as Enlightenment turned against itself (it must be noted Adorno & Horkheimer were among the first to state this, even if it is somewhat of a cliche now). Enlightenment's general instrumental reason knows only power as a measure of behavior. Therefore, it cannot tolerate the existence of groups that thrive, yet never have power, such as Jews and women. Whenever Enlightened society fails to satisfy the needs of its members, their anger is turned against such groups.
The last chapter, "Notes and Sketches", is as said a series of aphorisms, familiar to people who have read situationist works, or for example Walter Benjamin's notebooks.
Overall, this book is an extremely complex, but very worthwhile philosophical critique of modern culture, and a very pessimistic and negative analysis of Enlightenment and its possibilities. It is hard work to get to the bottom of it, but nevertheless rewarding for any student of philosophy.
The Black Book of Western Philosophy
The dialectic of Enlightenment is a history of appearances and false totalities that end up in totalitarianism. It is history presented as instrument of dominion. The false totalities of myth and rationality hides the primordial lie in which the law of identity appears in the world. By this logic, everything must be the same. Appearance is mythical in the sense that promise something that can never be fulfilled. The central argument of this wonderful book is that myth is already enlightenment because it tries to explain the world and gain utility from it; and enlightenment is already myth for it tries to exorcise everything different from it. As Adorno & Horkheimer puts it: "Enlightenment has a mythical horror to myth." The impulse for which Enlightenment tries to free itself from myth goes against itself in the form of saturating technical, formal rationality that will end up in the horror of ethnic genocide. This is the black book of Western philosophy.
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Not so great
Instant Enlightenment
A disappointing edition