Dialectic of Enlightenment
계몽의 변증법
The representative work of critical theory, written jointly by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in American exile. It first circulated in 1944 as a mimeographed Philosophical Fragments and was published under this title in 1947 by Querido in Amsterdam. It argues that enlightenment, which set out to free human beings from fear, hardened into the instrumental reason of domination over nature and so reverted to myth and barbarism, and develops the thesis through readings of Odysseus, Sade, the culture industry and antisemitism. It took over Nietzsche's critique of reason, reading him as the "relentless consummator of the Enlightenment", and Habermas later objected that the book pushed the critique of reason so far that it lost its own ground.
In depth
Why is this the "blackest book" of the Frankfurt School?
Dialectic of Enlightenment is counted the most fundamental and most widely read work of Frankfurt School critical theory. The German Wikipedia, borrowing Albrecht Wellmer's words, calls it "the blackest book of the Frankfurt School". Its starting point is a question of the early 1940s: why, instead of entering a truly human condition, has humanity sunk into a new kind of barbarism? Fascism and monopoly capitalism had triumphed, Stalinist state socialism stood in the East, and the technologically educated masses gave themselves over to totalitarianism with puzzling readiness.
The first chapter, "The Concept of Enlightenment", opens: "Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity." The preface sums up the whole book in two clauses: "Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology."
Seit je hat Aufklärung im umfassendsten Sinn fortschreitenden Denkens das Ziel verfolgt, von den Menschen die Furcht zu nehmen und sie als Herren einzusetzen. Aber die vollends aufgeklärte Erde strahlt im Zeichen triumphalen Unheils.
Schon der Mythos ist Aufklärung, und: Aufklärung schlägt in Mythologie zurück.
How was it written?
According to the German Wikipedia, the book was written between 1939 and 1944 in exile in Los Angeles, with Gretel Adorno taking down the two men's conversations. The first excursus (Odysseus) is Adorno's, the second (Juliette) Horkheimer's; Horkheimer drafted "The Concept of Enlightenment" and Adorno "The Culture Industry", and both revised them together. "Elements of Antisemitism" was, in Adorno's words, "literally dictated together". They finished in the spring of 1944 and presented the mimeographed typescript, titled Philosophical Fragments, to their colleague Friedrich Pollock on his fiftieth birthday.
The book edition published in 1947 by Querido in Amsterdam bore the title Dialectic of Enlightenment. In it the authors replaced Marxian terms such as "capital", "monopoly" and "profit" with less burdened words: "capital" became "economy", "relations of production" became "forms of the economy". Pirated copies circulated among German students in the 1960s, and an official reissue came only in 1969. The German Wikipedia presents the interpretation that these revisions mark the authors' distancing from a Marxism that presupposes the primacy of the economy.
The book consists of a preface, five essays and "Notes and Drafts": "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", and "Elements of Antisemitism: Limits of Enlightenment". The culture industry and instrumental reason are concepts that come from this book, but they are treated in the separate entries Culture industry and Instrumental reason.
What does it argue?
The programme of enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world: to dissolve myths and overthrow imagination with knowledge. But the authors argue that, in turning everything into calculable units in order to dominate nature, enlightenment turns that domination on human beings too. What cannot be counted is suspected as superstition, and people become a collective to be administered and manipulated. Enlightenment has therefore not defeated myth but does more thoroughly what myth did: binding people to a nature that repeats itself.
The Odysseus excursus reads the Odyssey as the prototype of the bourgeois individual. Odysseus survives by tricking the gods, but to hear the Sirens he has himself tied to the mast and stops his rowing companions' ears with wax. The price of survival is self-denial. "The cunning loner is already homo oeconomicus," they wrote. The Juliette excursus sets Kant against Sade and Nietzsche. Formalised reason can offer no argument in principle against murder, and Sade and Nietzsche, rather than covering this up, cried it out to the world.
What place does Nietzsche have in the book?
According to the German Wikipedia, the authors took many motifs of their critique of enlightenment from Nietzsche. They called him the "relentless consummator of the Enlightenment" and wrote that the "pitiless doctrines" of Nietzsche and Sade proclaiming the identity of domination and reason were "more merciful than those of the moral lackeys of the bourgeoisie". Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, editor of Horkheimer's collected works, judges that the idea of imperatives of self-preservation and domination hidden behind ideals of objectivity and universalist morality, and the thesis of the entanglement of rationality and myth, would have been impossible without Nietzsche. Max Weber's theory of disenchantment and Lukács's concepts of "reification" and "second nature" are also built in.
The book does not treat Nietzsche as a forerunner of Nazism. It rather values the honesty with which he exposed the violence of enlightenment instead of hiding it. Here the book parts ways with Lukács, who in the same years condemned Nietzsche as the founder of irrationalism. In his new 1962 preface to The Theory of the Novel Lukács later mocked Adorno and other German intellectuals for lodging in the "Grand Hotel Abyss", comfortably contemplating despair.
Who criticised it, and how?
The book was first written like a "message in a bottle", in the hope that someone would find it in a distant future. It was widely read only during the student movement of the 1960s, whose activists passed over its political resignation and leaned more on Horkheimer's earlier essays.
The most influential criticism came from Jürgen Habermas of the Frankfurt School's second generation. In chapter 5 of The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985) he charged that in the situation of the early 1940s the two had abandoned themselves to an unrestrained scepticism about reason instead of weighing the grounds that cast doubt on that scepticism itself. They overlooked the rational achievements of enlightenment, such as the differentiation of law, morality and science and the institutionalisation of democracy. He asked: "How can these two Enlighteners, which they still are, so underestimate the rational content of cultural modernity that they perceive in everything only an amalgam of reason and domination, power and validity?" He also pointed to a performative contradiction: so long as they assert a total context of delusion, they cannot ground that very assertion.
Wie können die beiden Aufklärer, die sie immer noch sind, den vernünftigen Gehalt der kulturellen Moderne so unterschätzen, daß sie in allem nur eine Legierung von Vernunft und Herrschaft, Macht und Geltung wahrnehmen?
On the other side, Michel Foucault paid tribute in a 1978 interview, saying that had he read the Frankfurt School earlier he would have been spared many errors. Leszek Kołakowski criticised the book's concept of "enlightenment" as an unhistorical bastard patched together from everything that angered the authors. The German Wikipedia concludes that the book is received today in the dispute between French post-structuralism, which defends the critique of reason, and Habermas, who criticises it.