The authors perceive a common element in these phenomena, the tendency toward self-destruction of the guiding criteria inherent in enlightenment thought from the beginning.
The various analyses concern such phenomena as the detachment of science from practical life, formalized morality, the manipulative nature of entertainment culture, and a paranoid behavioral structure, expressed in aggressive anti-Semitism, that marks the limits of enlightenment. The book consists in five chapters, at first glance unconnected, together with a number of shorter notes. Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle against natural forces, as represented in myths, are connected in a wide arch to the most threatening experiences of the present. Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of contemporary events. "What we had set out to do," the authors write in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism." Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. Tracing humanity's modern fall to the very rationality that was to be its liberation, the authors exposed the domination and violence that underpin the Enlightenment project.Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Modernity, far from redeeming the promises and hopes of the Enlightenment, had resulted in a stultification of mankind and administered society, characterised by simulation and candy-floss entertainment. Writing just after the Second World War and reflecting on the bureaucracy and myths of National Socialism and the inanity of the dawn of consumerism, Adorno and Horkheimer addressed themselves to a question which went to the very heart of the modern age: 'why mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism'. Dialectic of Enlightenment is one of the most celebrated works of modern social philosophy that continues to impress in its wide-ranging ambition.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer are the leading figures of the Frankfurt School and this book is their magnum opus.
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