- Length
- 304 pagesJephcott, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, Stanford, 2002
- Reading
- HardPresupposes texts it does not explain; a guide helps
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
Dialectic of Enlightenment
The darkest book in this section, written in exile in Los Angeles during the Holocaust, arguing that the disaster was not a failure of the Enlightenment but a consequence of it. Its chapter on the culture industry invented a phrase that is now used by people who would reject everything else in the book.
- Date
- 1944
- Author
- Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno
- Region
- Los Angeles exile
- Language
- German
- 1972 English, John Cumming Standard for thirty years; in copyright Attested
- 2002 English, Edmund Jephcott Stanford; the preferred version, in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Dialectical — Advance through contradiction and its resolution
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 193 years
Written in Los Angeles while its authors' families and colleagues were being murdered in Europe, and the founding text of critical theory.
What the book says
A book written in Californian exile by two German Jewish philosophers asking why humanity, instead of entering a truly human condition, was sinking into a new kind of barbarism. Their answer is that the fault lies in enlightenment itself, not in its incompleteness. Reason set out to free people from fear by mastering nature, and mastery required treating everything as material to be measured, compared and used - including other people and eventually the self, which has to dominate its own inner nature to become a reliable instrument. So the process that promised liberation produced new forms of domination, and myth and enlightenment turn out to be entangled: myth was already an attempt at explanation and control, and enlightenment reverts to myth when its own procedures become unquestionable. The argument is developed through two long excursuses - on Odysseus as the first bourgeois subject, tied to the mast so he can hear the Sirens without acting, and on Sade and Kant as complementary results of reason without content - and through the chapter that gave a phrase to the world, on the culture industry, which argues that mass entertainment produces standardised goods and standardised people.
What it argues
That the domination of nature and the domination of people share a structure, and that reason as it developed cannot tell them apart. Enlightenment on this account is not a historical period but a process - the disenchantment of the world, the reduction of quality to quantity, the substitution of formula for concept - and its logic is that whatever cannot be measured is treated as unreal and whatever cannot be used is treated as worthless. The self is the first casualty: to become a subject capable of controlling nature, a person must first suppress their own impulses, so the mastery is bought by internal repression. Odysseus is the emblem, hearing the Sirens only because he is bound and his crew are deafened. The culture industry chapter applies this to entertainment: mass culture does not give people what they want but produces the wants along with the goods, and offers the appearance of choice among identical things.
What it answered
The Enlightenment's own self-understanding, and the Marxist expectation that capitalist crisis would produce emancipation. By 1944 neither had happened - fascism had arrived in the most educated country in Europe and the American working class was watching films - and the book is an attempt to explain the failure without abandoning the hope. It is also, quietly, an answer to Heidegger, whose critique of technology they regarded as reaching a similar diagnosis from a politics they detested.
How it argues
By fragments and excursuses rather than by continuous demonstration, on the stated ground that a systematic form would reproduce the totalising logic under attack. The prose is dense, aphoristic and deliberately resistant to summary - Adorno held that a thought that could be paraphrased had already been assimilated - and the book proceeds by juxtaposition, reading Homer against Kant against Hollywood. This makes it exhilarating and very hard to argue with, since it rarely states a claim in a form that could be tested.
The moment
Horkheimer and Adorno were directing the Institute for Social Research in exile, living in Los Angeles among a colony of German émigrés that included Brecht, Mann and Schoenberg. They wrote in a suburb while the extermination of European Jewry was under way, and the book's final section is a series of fragments including one that attempts to explain antisemitism structurally rather than as a prejudice. Adorno returned to Frankfurt in 1949; the book was not republished in German until 1969.
How it travelled
Slowly, then everywhere in the humanities. Little read outside a small circle until the 1960s, it became central to the German student movement - to Adorno's considerable discomfort, since he called the police on occupying students and was publicly humiliated shortly before his death. The English translation of 1972 carried it into anglophone cultural studies, media theory and literary criticism, where culture industry became standard vocabulary. Habermas, Adorno's successor, built his own project largely as an attempt to escape the book's conclusion.
The strongest objection
Habermas', and it is the standard one: the critique is performatively self-defeating. If reason is instrumental all the way down and every attempt at rational criticism reproduces domination, then this book is an exercise in what it condemns, and there is no position from which its own claims could be justified. The authors half acknowledge this - the fragmentary form is partly an attempt to avoid the problem - but a critique with no normative ground can diagnose and cannot recommend, which is why the book ends in no politics at all. Habermas' answer was to locate a different kind of reason in communication itself; whether that escapes the difficulty or changes the subject is the argument between the first and second generations of the Frankfurt School.
Why read it
The culture industry chapter, which is the most read and the most quoted and can be taken on its own, and the first excursus on Odysseus, which is the best demonstration of the method. The whole is hard and rewarding in roughly equal measure. Do not expect conclusions.
- First printed
- 1947
- First in English
- 1972
- Digitised
- No
The 1947 Amsterdam edition differs from the 1944 mimeograph, and the authors removed or softened explicitly Marxist vocabulary between versions - a fact that has itself become a subject of scholarship.
Cumming's 1972 English was standard for thirty years; Jephcott's 2002 translation is now preferred. Both are in copyright.
Where it stands
Live and much used, particularly outside philosophy. Media studies, critical theory and the sociology of culture work from it constantly; philosophers are more divided, and the charge that it leaves no ground to stand on has never been fully answered.
On quoting this book
In copyright in German and in both English translations. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether the argument condemns reason as such or a particular historical form of it is the central interpretive question and both authors' later work pulls in different directions. Whether the culture industry analysis survives the fragmentation of mass media is disputed, with critics noting that it was formed on 1940s Hollywood and radio. The removal of Marxist vocabulary between the 1944 and 1947 versions has been read as prudence in exile and as a genuine political retreat. And the relation between the book's diagnosis and Adorno's own conduct in 1969 is still argued over in German intellectual history.