Social Philosophy

Dialectic of Enlightenment

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Max Horkheimer&Theodor Adorno

1944

Dialectic of Enlightenment is the defining text of the Frankfurt School and one of the most influential works of twentieth-century social philosophy. Written in American exile during the Second World War, it argues that the Enlightenment project of emancipating humanity through reason has turned against itself: the same drive to master nature that promised liberation has issued in bureaucratic domination, the culture industry's administered pleasure, and ultimately in the barbarism of fascism. The book's central thesis — that myth is already enlightenment and enlightenment reverts to mythology — is developed through analyses of Homer's Odyssey (read as the prototype of bourgeois self-mastery), the culture industry (mass culture as ideological manipulation), anti-Semitism (as the pathological projection of a society that cannot tolerate the non-identical), and the Kantian and de Sadian logics of moral reason. Written in a deliberately non-systematic, aphoristic style, Dialectic of Enlightenment is at once a work of immanent critique, historical diagnosis, and dark philosophical poetry.