Social Philosophy

Eclipse of Reason

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Max Horkheimer

1947

Eclipse of Reason, originally delivered as lectures at Columbia University, is Horkheimer's most systematic account of the crisis of rationality in modern Western culture. The book distinguishes between two conceptions of reason: objective reason, which holds that reason can identify genuine ends — a good life, a just society, a meaningful world — and subjective reason, which reduces reason to the calculation of the most efficient means to pre-given ends. Horkheimer argues that the triumph of subjective reason in modern industrial society has produced what he calls the eclipse of reason: the progressive elimination of the capacity to assess the ultimate worth of ends, leaving only the technical question of how to achieve whatever goals social forces happen to produce. The result is a culture that is technically brilliant and morally empty — one that can organise genocide as efficiently as assembly lines, and find no philosophical resources to distinguish one from the other.