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''Dialectic of Enlightenment'' (german: Dialektik der Aufklärung) is a work of
philosophy Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some ...
and
social criticism Social criticism is a form of academic or journalistic criticism focusing on social issues in contemporary society, in particular with respect to perceived injustices and power relations in general. Social criticism of the Enlightenment The or ...
written by
Frankfurt School The Frankfurt School (german: Frankfurter Schule) is a school of social theory and critical philosophy associated with the Institute for Social Research, at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1929. Founded in the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), dur ...
philosophers
Max Horkheimer Max Horkheimer (; ; 14 February 1895 – 7 July 1973) was a German philosopher and sociologist who was famous for his work in critical theory as a member of the Frankfurt School of social research. Horkheimer addressed authoritarianism, militari ...
and
Theodor W. Adorno Theodor W. Adorno ( , ; born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund; 11 September 1903 – 6 August 1969) was a German philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, musicologist, and composer. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of criti ...
. 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, link=no). One of the core texts of
critical theory A critical theory is any approach to social philosophy that focuses on society and culture to reveal, critique and challenge power structures. With roots in sociology and literary criticism, it argues that social problems stem more from soci ...
, ''Dialectic of Enlightenment'' explores the socio-psychological ''status quo'' that had been responsible for what the
Frankfurt School The Frankfurt School (german: Frankfurter Schule) is a school of social theory and critical philosophy associated with the Institute for Social Research, at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1929. Founded in the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), dur ...
considered the failure of the
Age of Enlightenment The Age of Enlightenment or the Enlightenment; german: Aufklärung, "Enlightenment"; it, L'Illuminismo, "Enlightenment"; pl, Oświecenie, "Enlightenment"; pt, Iluminismo, "Enlightenment"; es, La Ilustración, "Enlightenment" was an intel ...
. Together with Adorno's ''
The Authoritarian Personality ''The Authoritarian Personality'' is a 1950 sociology book by Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, researchers working at the University of California, Berkeley, during and shortly after World War II ...
'' (1950) and fellow Frankfurt School member Herbert Marcuse's ''
One-Dimensional Man ''One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society'' is a 1964 book by the philosopher and critical theorist Herbert Marcuse, in which the author offers a wide-ranging critique of both contemporary capitalism and the ...
'' (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.Held, D. (1980). ''Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas''. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.


Historical context

One of the distinguishing characteristics of the new
critical theory A critical theory is any approach to social philosophy that focuses on society and culture to reveal, critique and challenge power structures. With roots in sociology and literary criticism, it argues that social problems stem more from soci ...
, 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. Such would give rise to the "
pessimism Pessimism is a negative mental attitude in which an undesirable outcome is anticipated from a given situation. Pessimists tend to focus on the negatives of life in general. A common question asked to test for pessimism is " Is the glass half emp ...
" of the new critical theory over the possibility of human
emancipation Emancipation generally means to free a person from a previous restraint or legal disability. More broadly, it is also used for efforts to procure economic and social rights, political rights or equality, often for a specifically disenfranch ...
and
freedom Freedom is understood as either having the ability to act or change without constraint or to possess the power and resources to fulfill one's purposes unhindered. Freedom is often associated with liberty and autonomy in the sense of "giving on ...
.Adorno, T. W., and Max Horkheimer.
947 Year 947 ( CMXLVII) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * Summer – A Hungarian army led by Grand Prince Taksony campaigns in Italy, heading ...
2002. ''Dialectic of Enlightenment'', translated by E. Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Furthermore, this ambivalence was rooted in the historical circumstances in which ''Dialectic of Enlightenment'' was originally produced: the authors saw
National Socialism Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right politics, far-right Totalitarianism, totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hit ...
,
Stalinism Stalinism is the means of governing and Marxist-Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union from 1927 to 1953 by Joseph Stalin. It included the creation of a one-party totalitarian police state, rapid industrialization, the theory ...
,
state capitalism State capitalism is an economic system in which the state undertakes business and commercial (i.e. for-profit) economic activity and where the means of production are nationalized as state-owned enterprises (including the processes of capital ...
, and
culture industry The term culture industry (german: Kulturindustrie) was coined by the critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), and was presented as critical vocabulary in the chapter "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment ...
as entirely new forms of social domination that could not be adequately explained within the terms of traditional theory. For Adorno and Horkheimer (relying on the economist
Friedrich Pollock Friedrich Pollock (; ; 22 May 1894 – 16 December 1970) was a German social scientist and philosopher. He was one of the founders of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, and a member of the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxist th ...
's thesis on National Socialism), state intervention in the economy had effectively abolished the tension in capitalism between the " relations of production" and the "material productive forces of society," a tension that, according to traditional theory, constituted the primary
contradiction In traditional logic, a contradiction occurs when a proposition conflicts either with itself or established fact. It is often used as a tool to detect disingenuous beliefs and bias. Illustrating a general tendency in applied logic, Aristotle's ...
within capitalism. The market (as an "unconscious" mechanism for the distribution of goods) had been replaced by
centralized planning A planned economy is a type of economic system where investment, production and the allocation of capital goods takes place according to economy-wide economic plans and production plans. A planned economy may use centralized, decentralized, par ...
. Because of this, contrary to
Marx Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...
's famous prediction in his preface to ''
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy ''A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy'' (german: Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie) is a book by Karl Marx, first published in 1859. The book is mainly a critique of political economy achieved by critiquing the writings of the ...
'', this shift did not lead to "an era of social revolution," but rather to
fascism Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultra-nationalist political ideology and movement,: "extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy an ...
and
totalitarianism Totalitarianism is a form of government and a political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high if not complete degree of control and reg ...
. As such, traditional theory was left, in
Jürgen Habermas Jürgen Habermas (, ; ; born 18 June 1929) is a German social theorist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. His work addresses communicative rationality and the public sphere. Associated with the Frankfurt School, Habermas's wor ...
' words, without "anything in reserve to which it might appeal; and when the forces of production enter into a baneful symbiosis with the relations of production that they were supposed to blow wide open, there is no longer any dynamism upon which critique could base its hope." For Adorno and Horkheimer, this posed the problem of how to account for the apparent persistence of domination in the absence of the very contradiction that, according to traditional critical theory, was the source of domination itself.


Topics and themes

The problems posed by the rise of fascism with the demise of the
liberal Liberal or liberalism may refer to: Politics * a supporter of liberalism ** Liberalism by country * an adherent of a Liberal Party * Liberalism (international relations) * Sexually liberal feminism * Social liberalism Arts, entertainment and m ...
state and the market (together with the failure of a social revolution to materialize in its wake) constitute the theoretical and historical perspective that frames the overall argument of the book—the two theses that "Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology." 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 Reason is the capacity of consciously applying logic by drawing conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking the truth. It is closely associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, science, ...
, 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 Technocracy is a form of government in which the decision-maker or makers are selected based on their expertise in a given area of responsibility, particularly with regard to scientific or technical knowledge. This system explicitly contrasts wi ...
. They characterize the peak of this process as
positivism Positivism is an empiricist philosophical theory that holds that all genuine knowledge is either true by definition or positive—meaning ''a posteriori'' facts derived by reason and logic from sensory experience.John J. Macionis, Linda M. G ...
, referring to both the
logical positivism Logical positivism, later called logical empiricism, and both of which together are also known as neopositivism, is a movement in Western philosophy whose central thesis was the verification principle (also known as the verifiability criterion o ...
of the
Vienna Circle The Vienna Circle (german: Wiener Kreis) of Logical Empiricism was a group of elite philosophers and scientists drawn from the natural and social sciences, logic and mathematics who met regularly from 1924 to 1936 at the University of Vienna, cha ...
and broader trends that they saw in continuity with this movement. Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of positivism has been criticized as too broad; they are particularly critiqued for interpreting
Ludwig Wittgenstein Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( ; ; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is considere ...
as a positivist—at the time only his ''
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus The ''Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus'' (widely abbreviated and cited as TLP) is a book-length philosophical work by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein which deals with the relationship between language and reality and aims to define the ...
'' had been published, not his later works—and for failing to examine critiques of positivism from within analytic philosophy. To characterize this history, Horkheimer and Adorno draw on a wide variety of material, including the
philosophical anthropology Philosophical anthropology, sometimes called anthropological philosophy, is a discipline dealing with questions of metaphysics and phenomenology of the human person. History Ancient Christian writers: Augustine of Hippo Augustine of Hippo ...
contained in Marx's early writings, centered on the notion of "
labor Labour or labor may refer to: * Childbirth, the delivery of a baby * Labour (human activity), or work ** Manual labour, physical work ** Wage labour, a socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer ** Organized labour and the la ...
;"
Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (; or ; 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, prose poet, cultural critic, philologist, and composer whose work has exerted a profound influence on contemporary philosophy. He began his car ...
's
genealogy of morality ''On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic'' (german: Zur Genealogie der Moral: Eine Streitschrift) is an 1887 book by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It consists of a preface and three interrelated treatises ('Abhandlungen' in German) that ...
, and the emergence of conscience through the renunciation of the
will to power The will to power (german: der Wille zur Macht) is a concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The will to power describes what Nietzsche may have believed to be the main driving force in humans. However, the concept was never systemati ...
; Freud's account in ''
Totem and Taboo ''Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics'', or ''Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics'', (german: Totem und Tabu: Einige Übereinstimmungen im Seelenl ...
'' of the emergence of civilization and law in murder of the primordial father; and
ethnological Ethnology (from the grc-gre, ἔθνος, meaning 'nation') is an academic field that compares and analyzes the characteristics of different peoples and the relationships between them (compare cultural, social, or sociocultural anthropology). ...
research on magic and rituals in primitive societies; as well as
myth criticism Myth is a folklore genre consisting of narratives that play a fundamental role in a society, such as foundational tales or origin myths. Since "myth" is widely used to imply that a story is not objectively true, the identification of a narrat ...
,
philology Philology () is the study of language in oral and writing, written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defin ...
, and
literary analysis Literary criticism (or literary studies) is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of literature's goals and methods. T ...
. The authors coined the term ''
culture industry The term culture industry (german: Kulturindustrie) was coined by the critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), and was presented as critical vocabulary in the chapter "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment ...
'', arguing that in a capitalist society, mass culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods—films, radio programmes, magazines, etc. These homogenized cultural products are used to
manipulate Manipulation may refer to: * Manipulation (psychology) - the action of manipulating someone in a clever or unscrupulous way *Crowd manipulation - use of crowd psychology to direct the behavior of a crowd toward a specific action ::* Internet mani ...
mass society into docility and passivity. The introduction of the radio, a
mass medium Mass media refers to a diverse array of media technologies that reach a large audience via mass communication. The technologies through which this communication takes place include a variety of outlets. Broadcast media transmit information ...
, no longer permits its listener any mechanism of reply, as was the case with the telephone. Instead, listeners are not subjects anymore but passive receptacles exposed "in authoritarian fashion to the same programs put out by different stations." By associating the Enlightenment and
Totalitarianism Totalitarianism is a form of government and a political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high if not complete degree of control and reg ...
with Marquis de Sade's works—especially ''Juliette'', in excursus II—the text also contributes to the pathologization of
sadomasochist Sadomasochism ( ) is the giving and receiving of pleasure from acts involving the receipt or infliction of pain or humiliation. Practitioners of sadomasochism may seek sexual pleasure from their acts. While the terms sadist and masochist refer ...
desires, as discussed by historian of sexuality Alison Moore.Moore, Alison M. 2015. ''Sexual Myths of Modernity: Sadism, Masochism and Historical Teleology''. Lanham:
Lexington Books Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group is an independent publishing house founded in 1949. Under several imprints, the company offers scholarly books for the academic market, as well as trade books. The company also owns the book distributing compa ...
. .


Editions

The book made its first appearance in 1944 under the title ''Philosophische Fragmente'' by Social Studies Association, Inc. (New York). ''Dialektik der Aufklärung'' (Dialectic of Enlightenment) was published as a revised version in 1947 by
Querido Verlag Emanuel Querido (6 August 1871 – 23 July 1943) was a successful Dutch publisher as the founder and owner of N.V. Em. Querido Uitgeversmaatschappij, which published Dutch titles, and of , which published titles of German writers in exile from N ...
(Amsterdam)''.'' It was reissued in 1969 by S. Fischer Verlag. There have been two English translations: the first by John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972); and a more recent translation, based on the definitive text from Horkheimer's collected works, by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).


See also

*
Counter-Enlightenment The Counter-Enlightenment refers to a loose collection of intellectual stances that arose during the European Enlightenment in opposition to its mainstream attitudes and ideals. The Counter-Enlightenment is generally seen to have continued from t ...
* ''
Das Kapital ''Das Kapital'', also known as ''Capital: A Critique of Political Economy'' or sometimes simply ''Capital'' (german: Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, link=no, ; 1867–1883), is a foundational theoretical text in materialist phi ...
''


Notes


External links


The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
" Excerpt of Chapter 1 of ''The Dialectic of Enlightenment'', transcribed by A. Blunden
998 Year 998 ( CMXCVIII) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * Spring – Otto III retakes Rome and restores power in the papal city. Crescenti ...
2005.
Dialectic of Enlightenment
" in the ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy''. {{DEFAULTSORT:Dialectic Of Enlightenment 1944 non-fiction books 1947 non-fiction books Age of Enlightenment Critical theory Frankfurt School German non-fiction books Marxist books New Left Works by Max Horkheimer Works by Theodor W. Adorno Criticism of rationalism