Dialectic of Enlightenment
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Written by Frankfurt School philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, the book made its first appearance in 1944 under the title Philosophische Fragmente by Social Studies Association, Inc., New York. A revised version was published in 1947 by Querido Verlag in Amsterdam with the title Dialektik der Aufklärung. It was reissued in 1969 by S Fischer Verlag GmbH. 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). It has had a major effect on 20th century philosophy, sociology, culture, and politics, inspiring especially the 1960s counter-culture.
Enlightened Totalitarianism
It was not until after WWII that 'the Enlightenment' re-emerged as a key organising concept in social and political thought and the history of ideas. Shadowing it has been a resurgent Counter-Enlightenment literature blaming the eighteenth century faith in reason for twentieth century totalitarianism. The locus classicus of this view is Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's "Dialectic of Enlightenment" (1947), which traces the degeneration of the general concept of enlightenment from ancient Greece (epitomised by the cunning 'bourgeois' hero Odysseus) to twentieth century fascism. (Tellingly, they say nothing about communism, which is, for many liberal critics of the Enlightenment like Berlin and Jacob Talmon, directly descended from the rationalism of the philosophes). While this influential book takes 'enlightenment' as its target, this includes its eighteenth century form – which we now call 'the Enlightenment' – epitomised by the Marquis de Sade. Many postmodern writers and some feminists (e.g. Jane Flax) have made similar arguments, depicting the Enlightenment conception of reason as imperialistic and totalitarian. Michel Foucault, for example, argued that attitudes towards the insane during the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries show that supposedly enlightened notions of humane treatment were not universally adhered to, but instead, that the Age of Reason had to construct an image of "Unreason" against which to take an opposing stand. Berlin himself, although no postmodernist, argues that the Enlightenment's legacy in the twentieth century has been monism (which he claims favours political authoritarianism), whereas the legacy of the Counter-Enlightenment has been pluralism (something he associates with liberalism). These are two of the 'strange reversals' of modern intellectual history.
In essence, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the Enlightenment turned "magical" culture, which looked for associations, analogies, and relationships, into a scientific culture, which sought to reduce everything to the irreducible, to base units of measurement, to the smallest particles, and as often as possible to numbers. This resulted in an inability to address problems of relationships, and often of anything to do with the irrational (e.g., sexuality, emotion, etc.), as well as larger cultural concerns that could not be reduced to the individual. The ideological structure had the tendency, common to most political ideologies, of arguing for its own accuracy. This kind of enlightenment thinking, they argue, always implicitly claims that anything that is not reducible or quantifiable is simply not worth paying attention to. It is immaterial in the metaphorical sense: it might as well not exist. Thus, concepts as divergent as subjectivity (which cannot be measured or objectified) and collective action (which is always understood as merely the action of many individuals) cannot be understood because precisely what needs to be understood is relational and/or subjective. This "magical" versus "scientific" thinking is easily recognizable in the two solitudes of contemporary Humanities and Sciences research in universities.
The work contains:
- "The Concept of Enlightenment";
- "Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment"
- "Excursus II: Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality"
- "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" (in which they prefigure Marshall McLuhan's thesis that "the medium is the message")
- "Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment"
- "Notes and Drafts"
See also
