Dialectic of Enlightenment

Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W Adorno, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott, 252 pages

 

Originally published in 1947, republished as part of the Cultural Memory in the Present series, this book was the product of discussions between the German expatriate philosophers Horkheimer and Adorno on the subject of progress and Enlightenment, which they see as simultaneously producing "cruelty and liberation."  Unalloyed reason tends by its very nature to organize people more and more restrictively, while the dogma of private judgement leads to social atomism.  With reason unable to conquer the old atavism of the human animal, the default psychic disorder becomes that of a paranoid combination of narcissism and impotence.

 

There are seeds here of other, better books: the analysis of the roots of modern anti-semitism foreshadows Arendt, that of mass media McLuhan, that of psychological displacement Christopher Lasch and Philip Rieff.  Unfortunately, especially compared to those authors, this book seems rather dated, especially in its reliance on now-out-of-fashion psychoanalytic developments and a binary "either communist or fascist" political outlook.  Finally, their materialism ends, as it must, in a bleak nihilism where even marriage becomes a sullen power struggle papered over with shallow sentimentality.

 

The authors seem to diagnose some problems well, but their own relativistic presuppositions close them up inside a logical box from which they cannot escape.  Instead, their supposed dialectic is revealed as a closed circle, leading them back to the same position from which they began.