Dialectic of Enlightenment
LC Class | B3279.H8473 P513 2002 |
Dialectic of Enlightenment (German: Dialektik der Aufklärung) is a work of philosophy and social criticism written by Frankfurt School philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.[1] The text, published in 1947, is a revised version of what the authors originally had circulated among friends and colleagues in 1944 under the title of Philosophical Fragments (German: Philosophische Fragmente).[2]
One of the core texts of critical theory, Dialectic of Enlightenment explores the socio-psychological status quo that had been responsible for what the Frankfurt School considered the failure of the Enlightenment. They argue that its failure culminated in the rise of Fascism, Stalinism, the culture industry and mass consumer capitalism. Rather than liberating humanity as the Enlightenment had promised, they argue it had resulted in the opposite: in totalitarianism, and new forms of barbarism and social domination.[3]
Together with Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality (1950) and fellow Frankfurt School member Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (1964), it has had a major effect on 20th-century philosophy, sociology, culture, and politics, especially inspiring the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s.[4]
Historical context
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In the 1969 preface to the 2002 publication, Horkheimer and Adorno wrote that the original was written, "when the end of the National Socialist terror was in sight."[5]: xi One of the distinguishing characteristics of the new critical theory, as Adorno and Horkheimer set out to elaborate it in Dialectic of Enlightenment, is a certain ambivalence concerning the ultimate source or foundation of social domination.[5]: 229
Such would give rise to the "
For Adorno and Horkheimer (relying on the economist
[G]one are the objective laws of the market which ruled in the actions of the entrepreneurs and tended toward catastrophe. Instead the conscious decision of the managing directors executes as results (which are more obligatory than the blindest price-mechanisms) the old law of value and hence the destiny of capitalism.
— Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 38
Because of this, contrary to
Topics and themes
The problems posed by the
The history of human societies, as well as that of the formation of individual ego or self, is re-evaluated from the standpoint of what Horkheimer and Adorno perceived at the time as the ultimate outcome of this history: the collapse or "regression" of reason, with the rise of National Socialism, into something (referred to as merely "enlightenment" for the majority of the text) resembling the very forms of superstition and myth out of which reason had supposedly emerged as a result of historical progress or development.
Horkheimer and Adorno believe that in the process of "enlightenment," modern philosophy had become over-rationalized and an instrument of technocracy. They characterize the peak of this process as positivism, referring to both the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle and broader trends that they saw in continuity with this movement.[11] Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of positivism has been criticized as too broad; they are particularly critiqued for interpreting Ludwig Wittgenstein as a positivist—at the time only his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus had been published, not his later works—and for failing to examine critiques of positivism from within analytic philosophy.[12]
To characterize this history, Horkheimer and Adorno draw on a wide variety of material, including the
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argue that
Adorno and Horkheimer suggest that
The authors coined the term
By associating the
Editions
The book was first published as Philosophische Fragmente in New York in 1944, by the
There have been two English translations: the first by John Cumming (New York:
See also
Notes
- ^ OCLC 48851495.
- ^ Schmidt, James (1998). "'Language, Mythology, and Enlightenment: Historical Notes on Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment.'". Social Research. 65 (4): 807-38 (p.809).
- ^ Cikaj, Klejton (2023-05-04). "Dialectic of Enlightenment: Adorno & Horkheimer's Work in 6 Parts". The Collector. Retrieved 2024-03-22.
- ^ a b Held, D. (1980). Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
- ^ ISBN 0-8047-3632-4.
- ^ Habermas, Jürgen. [1985] 1987. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, translated by F. Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. p. 116: "Critical Theory was initially developed in Horkheimer's circle to think through political disappointments at the absence of revolution in the West, the development of Stalinism in Soviet Russia, and the victory of fascism in Germany. It was supposed to explain mistaken Marxist prognoses, but without breaking Marxist intentions."
- ISBN 0-262-04080-8.
- ^ Pollock, Friedrich. 1941. "Is National Socialism a New Order?" Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (2):440–45. p. 453.
- ^ van Reijen, Willem, and Jan Bransen. "The Disappearance of Class History in the Dialectic of Enlightenment." In Dialectic of Enlightenment. p. 248.
- JSTOR 488023.
- ISBN 978-0-226-40336-6.
- ^ Josephson-Storm (2017, pp. 242, 243–4)
- ^ Dialectic of Enlightenment, 7, 159, 162.
- ^ Dialectic of Enlightenment, 10, 256.
- S2CID 143713118.
- ^ pp. 94–5 quotation:
Culture today is infecting everything with sameness. Film, radio, and magazines form a system. Each branch of culture is unanimous within itself and all are unanimous together. Even the aesthetic manifestations of political opposites proclaim the same inflexible rhythm...All mass culture under monopoly is identical... Films and radio no longer need to present themselves as art. The truth that they are nothing but business is used as an ideology to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce.
- ^ pp. 94–5 quotation:
...The standardized forms, it is claimed, were originally derived from the needs of the consumers: that is why they are accepted with so little resistance. In reality, a cycle of manipulation and retroactive need is unifying the system ever more tightly.
- ^ pp. 95–6 quotation:
The step from telephone to radio has clearly distinguished the roles. The former liberally permitted the participant to play the role of subject. The latter democratically makes everyone equally into listeners, in order to expose them in authoritarian fashion to the same programs put out by different stations. No mechanism of reply has been developed...
- ISBN 978-0-7391-3077-3.
External links
- "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Excerpt of "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" from The Dialectic of Enlightenment, transcribed by A. Blunden [1998] 2005.
- "Dialectic of Enlightenment," in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.