Dialectic Of Enlightenment Research Articles

Max Horkheimer on Law's Force of Resistance

The law maintains, rather than challenges, the powers that be – or so it is commonly thought. In ‘Rackets and Spirit,’ a little known and untranslated essay, Max Horkheimer complicates this notion by attributing to law a ‘force of resistance’. He contends that, under certain conditions, the legal process develops a logic of its own, one that can become disjointed from the rationale of power. In this Critical Reflection, I look closely at the paragraph in which Horkheimer introduces the notion of a ‘force of resistance’. I argue that Horkheimer develops a theme that he and Theodor W. Adorno return to in the Dialectic of Enlightenment: the spiritual instruments of domination, among them law, have the potential to turn against domination. At the same time, Horkheimer is clear that law does not resist automatically: it takes human agents to put the legal sphere into opposition to the political sphere. I illustrate this thought with respect to the recent history of federal abortion rights in the United States.

Философско-антропологическая проблематика в работе М. Хоркхаймера и Т. Адорно «Диалектика Просвещения»

The article is devoted to the analysis of the work of the Frankfurt school theorists M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno “Dialectics of Enlightenment. Philosophical fragments” from a philosophical and anthropological perspective. These thinkers became famous primarily as representatives of sociological knowledge. The study showed that their heritage also raises philosophical and anthropological issues. The work shows that in “Dialectics of Enlightenment” the authors offer an original concept of the history of European culture, presented from the perspective of the evolution of being and consciousness of the individual. Thinkers are convinced that the entire history of European culture appears as a distinction between man and nature, the removal of the natural from the consciousness of the individual. Modern culture is considered by M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno as the apogee of this sociocultural crisis, after which, according to them, “non-existence” comes. Based on the presented assessment of theorists of the Frankfurt School, a conclusion is made about the validity of understanding the current crisis of European culture (crisis of the 20th century) as a sociocultural transformation, marking the entrance to a new stage in the dynamics of the countries of this region.

A semblance of freedom: Horkheimer and Adorno’s conception of myth

In this paper I argue that the pessimistic reading of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which suggests reason is ensconced within the domination of myth, misses a key component of the authors' argument. Specifically, it misses the possibility that the liberation from the heteronomy of myth might occur via a critique of myth. Using Owen Hulatt’s reinterpretation of Adorno’s account of the tension between mimesis and self-preservation as a point of orientation, I show that while myth for Horkheimer and Adorno is synonymous with a heteronomous form of life, they simultaneously recognize it as an incomplete but largely untapped mediator of the history of human experience (via language), and thus a promising source of rational self-knowledge. Specifically, myth can illuminate fragments of both the contingent factors that led to human sociality becoming entwined with domination, while also offering momentary reflections of the kinds of life that were relinquished in the drive for instrumentalised survival. I propose that for Horkheimer and Adorno it is myth’s linguistic mediation between a community of speakers and their (often violent and ambiguous) pasts that is unique. It is thus myth’s capacity to offer a meditation on those other possibilities of human existence that presents a renewed chance of enlightenment.

Why Professor Habermas Would Fail a Class on Dialectic of Enlightenment

Would Habermas’s “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment” pass muster as coursework in a class on Dialectic of Enlightenment? Using this polemical thought experiment setup as an estrangement device, I critically discuss Habermas’s essay that was pivotal in his repositioning of Critical Theory in the 1980s. I argue that it is philosophically and biographically unreflective; and that he is engaging in underhanded politicking. I sketch an alternative reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment: instead of viewing it as the dead end that Habermas presents it to be, we can see as a self-therapeutical exercise in destabilizing a complacent self-conception whereby modernity is the pinnacle of moral progress—an exercise which might have a certain exemplarity for others in the ongoing quest of making use of our own understanding. The contribution is rounded off with a postscript by a second assessor of Habermas’s essay, discussing both the proposed assessment and the polemical thought experiment.

Philosophy and University Studies

The German social philosopher, educator, and founder of critical social theory Max Horkheimer wrote his work ‘Philosophy and University Studies’ as a speech delivered on August 6, 1948, at the University of Frankfurt before returning from emigration to the United States to post-war West Germany. A year later, after Horkheimer was reinstated as Director of the Institute for Social Research, this text was first published in the fourth issue of the ‘Frankfurter Hefte’. In this work, with which the German philosopher began a cycle of his philosophical and educational works, he continued the previous theme of the book ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ (1947), which, published in collaboration with Theodor W. Adorno, has the character of a programmatic socio-philosophical work of post-war critical theory. Horkhamer’s critique of the ideological elimination of the phenomenon of Western individual, which he made in his post-war article ‘Authority and the Family in Modernity’ (1947-1949), also found its theoretical continuation here. Following the theoretical essence of the ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’, the Frankfurt philosopher identified one of the factors negative for the humanistic socio-cultural development of Western European society, which historically led to the humanitarian catastrophe of the Nazi ideology carriers domination, the theoretical knowledge that has powerfully eliminated the presence of customary principles of moral coexistence in Western society. The author also noted the process of ideological abolition of the social significance of the individual’s activity as a phenomenon of Western culture. Philosophy, primarily as a producer and carrier of abstract meanings, including humanistic ones, ideologically significant for normal social life, because of the social alienation caused by such a theory and society, has lost the opportunity to be a significant knowledge for both Western European society and university education as a common tool for this culture to educate the Western personality. In order to renew the spiritual forces of social life and turn the course of history towards humanised change, it was proposed to bring to the forefront of the renewed university education the power of personal critical thinking, the ability to foster which social power could not completely destroy in philosophy because of its traditionally inherent spiritual resilience.

Hybris and Expedition: The Dialectic of Enlightenment and the North Pole Expeditions in Christoph Ransmayr’s The Terrors of Ice and Darkness and Simon Schwartz’s Packeis

Die unzugänglichen Regionen der Erde, wie der Nordpol, gelten seit jeher als erstrebenswerte Gebiete, die es zu erobern gilt. Sowohl die natürlichen Bedingungen als auch die technischen Unzulänglichkeiten machen Reisen dorthin zum Abenteuer. Christoph Ransmayrs Roman Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis und Simon Schwartz‘ Graphic Novel Packeis handeln von einem solchen Abenteuer. Beide Werke thematisieren die Nordpolexpeditionen und vermitteln den Leser:innen deren Ergebnisse in Form einer metahistoriographischen Fiktion. Vor diesem Hintergrund verfolgt die vorliegende Arbeit das Ziel, die beiden Werke im Hinblick auf metahistoriographische Fiktion und Dialektik der Aufklärung zu vergleichen. Die Arbeit geht der Frage nach, wie sich koloniale und männliche Hybris in diesen beiden Werken manifestieren, da das Begehren nach dem Unerreichbaren eine zentrale Rolle spielt und die Hauptfiguren exemplarisch für Hybris stehen. Darüber hinaus wird argumentiert, dass sich das Begehren und die Barbarei des Menschen an einem Punkt kreuzen. Auf dieser Grundlage bildet die Dialektik der Aufklärung den theoretischen Rahmen der Studie.

Homo Ecologicus : Animism, Historical Materialism and Planetary Mimesis

Abstract: The contemporary return toward mimesis turns in at least two directions. The first doubles down on Plato's suspicion of mimesis as a contagious threat to rationality and the healthy functioning of the polis and in this sense advocates, at the level of human behaviour, a turning away from mimesis and the pathological, all-too-human nature of homo mimeticus . The second form of the mimetic turn is a more wholehearted turning towards mimesis, seen not as contagious pathology but as cure, as planetary solution to our all-too-human modes of being in the world. This essay is interested in this second, utopian turn towards mimesis, charting the dialectical re-emergence of homo mimeticus as homo ecologicus in Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment and Noongar novelist Kim Scott's That Deadman Dance .

"The Stereotype Takes Care of Everything": Labor Antisemitism and Critical Theory During World War II.

During World War II, the Institute for Social Research conducted an innovative study of American working-class antisemitism. This article goes beyond existing literature by reconstructing the project's evolving understanding of labor antisemitism-from ideology to psychopathology. This change, it argues, arose from the project's methods, findings, and analytical concepts-especially the long-overlooked concept of the stereotype. The article documents this concept's role in two better-known Institute works from the period: Dialectic of Enlightenment and Authoritarian Personality. Throughout, it traces continuities in the Institute's research program and reconsiders the balance between its empirical studies and its critical theory in the 1940s.

Antiutopianism, Social Darwinism, and Self-Preservation: Some Reflections

ABSTRACT This essay responds to Darko Suvin by focusing on his observations on selfhood and personality. Antiutopias are defined as narrative texts framed by fear and anxiety regarding the self-preservation of individuality and by subscription to the principle of relentless struggle for survival amid resource scarcity. The ambiguities that insinuate themselves within this framework include: first, the conflation of “self-preservation” with domination over others; second, the oscillation of self-preservation between a “biopolitical” pole and a “cultural” one. Turning to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, the article explicates why, in their view, “self-preservation” destroys “the very thing that is to be preserved.” The conclusion involves examining a few literary texts both as instances of the “pleasures of misery” imposed by the antiutopian obsession with “self-preservation,” and—contrastively—as ways of exploring the high cost and risk involved in a utopian transformation of selfhood beyond the dictates of “self-preservation.”

Myth, sacrifice, and the critique of capitalism in dialectic of enlightenment

ABSTRACT Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno famously argued that ‘myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.’ Although much scholarship has analyzed and built upon Horkheimer and Adorno’s insight, it has often conflated myth with another concept: epic. By closely reading Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, this article disentangles the two concepts and elucidates key features of myth. Sacrifice, it argues, stood at the centre of myth, connecting and organizing its other dimensions. Next, the article reconstructs the lineage of Horkheimer and Adorno’s account of myth and sacrifice in the fields of anthropology, ethnology, and sociology. Specifically, Horkheimer and Adorno drew on analyses of sacrificial rites in these disciplines to argue that sacrifices constituted a transaction between worshipers and gods and, therefore, established control, disempowerment, and fraud. Finally, the article takes up Horkheimer and Adorno’s task of tracing the conduits between myth and enlightenment by identifying parallel features of sacrifice and modern wage labor. To conclude, the article indicates the significance of mythical sacrifice by connecting its analysis of wage labour to contemporary theorizing about the ‘theological dimensions of capitalism.’ Together, these arguments show the centrality of Dialectic to theories of myth as conceptual tools and critical resources.

Editors’ introduction to the Special Section: The ethics and politics of the Anthropocene

Editors’ introduction to the Special Section: The ethics and politics of the Anthropocene

The rule of unreason: Analyzing (anti‐)democratic regression

The rule of unreason: Analyzing (anti‐)democratic regression

‘To conceal domination in production’: Horkheimer and Adorno’s critical functionalist theory of race

This article revisits the Frankfurt School’s reflections on race, anti-Semitism and fascism, focusing especially on the theory of race implicit in Dialectic of Enlightenment. It argues that this theory has the potential to be developed into a critical functionalist theory of race that avoids both class and race reductionism, offering a thoroughly intersectional competitor to currently dominant philosophies of race. The key to such a theory is the view that racialization plays a functional role in sustaining capitalist exploitation. While Horkheimer and Adorno focus on the scapegoat function of racialization, I argue that this function, while important, does not exhaust the possible functionalities of racialization and neglects an especially crucial function: the maintenance of a specifically racial form of exploitation.

Frankfurt Okulu’nun Eleştirel Teorisi ve Popüler Kültür Ürünleri Olarak Bilgisayar Oyunlarının Bir Eleştirisi

Frankfurt School’s critical theory provides a framework to study mass media. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer, two of the most prominent theorists of the School, coined the term “culture industry” to discuss the state of the entertainment sector. However, the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School were either dead or they simply did not analyze the case of video games when the medium became an important agent both in social and economic terms. The main argument of this paper is that, as an inseparable part of the entertainment sector of today’s capitalist societies, video games are eligible for an analysis as products of the culture industry. It is argued in the study that the fantasy worlds of video games divert people’s attention away from the problems of capitalist societies. Further, the commodities are claimed to be getting increasingly standardized and are aimed at providing easy pleasures to consumers. Besides, a discussion of video games is carried out in accordance with the view that the video games of today seem to cater more to casual gamers than “serious” gamers, transpiring a dichotomy akin to that of high culture versus low culture.

Dialectic of Enlightenment?

This essay takes the 30th anniversary of Ingeborg Maus’ best-known book, ‘Zur Aufklärung der Demokratietheorie’ (‘On the Enlightenment of Democratic Theory’), as an occasion to examine the program of her critical theory in an independent research study. In the first chapter, the characteristic features of this program are presented, with Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ as the point of reference. The second chapter then shows that Maus’ program of an enlightenment of democratic theory is characterized by a specific Rousseauism, which is to be seen as the ‘undialectical’ basic structure of her critical theory. The last two chapters are devoted to the concrete object on which Maus carries out her program: Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of state and the current reception of this philosophy. While the third chapter, looking at Kant’s late ‘Staatsrecht’ in the ‘Metaphysics of Morals’, demonstrates the power of Maus’s program in the field of Kant scholarship, the last chapter argues that her approach reaches its limits on this very object, Kant’s late ‘Staatsrecht’ of 1797. Because of her in crucial respects ‘undialectical’ epistemological interest, Maus is unable to recognize Kant’s thoroughly dialectically organized philosophy of state in the 1797-text. This negative insight opens up the possibility of modifying Maus’s program of a critical theory.

No Adornian Godfather?. A Search for a Comparable British Figure in Music Aesthetics

There is no doubt that Theodor W. Adorno impacted the American and British Musicology and Music Theory movements – in particular, his Philosophy of New Music and Dialectic of Enlightenment are major works that are still discussed. However, his role in America and Britain was quite different from his position in Germany. His immense support for Schönberg, his tremendous aesthetic tirades against Stravinsky, the “point-zero-situation” after World War II and the misperception of his approach to serialism – he was not an advocate, but a critic – were major grounds upon which German avant-garde music was based. Avant-garde in Germany without Adorno – what would that be? In that context, his impact on German musicology is interesting to explore. His writings, although often sharpened by harsh, non-deductive and even highly subjective aesthetic evaluations (cf. his gloss on Sibelius), set the philosophical basis from which every (German) musicologist had to start his line of argument. Even if someone did not agree with Adorno, it was unthinkable within German musicological discourse not to discuss him. The long-standing discourse between Dahlhaus and Eggebrecht would have run differently without Adorno’s almost almighty habitus. This article compares selected twentieth-century British musicologists, their roles in academia and their methodological approaches with Adorno’s. Two possible candidates for a “British Adorno”, namely Hans Keller and Roger Scruton, are discussed in detail.

Enlightenment, Critical Theory, and the Role of Business Schools in the Anthropocene

Purpose: This article analyses relations between the Dialectic of Enlightenment, critical theory, and the Anthropocene, and poses the question: How do the Dialectic of Enlightenment and critical theory relate to the Anthropocene? Moreover, what is the role of business schools and critical management studies in the context of the Anthropocene? Theoretical framework: The Dialectic of Enlightenment questioned why advancements in rationality and technology failed to lead humanity to emancipation. Moreover, advancements in rationality and technology have led to the Anthropocene: a new geological age marked by the human capacity to modify the climate and ecosystems of Planet Earth. This debate, which is related to fields such as sustainability, organisations, and management, can be held in business schools. Method/design/approach: To discuss this theme, we compose a theoretical essay. Results and conclusion: The shock of the Anthropocene has provoked the need to think differently about social and environmental issues and to declare humanity as being responsible for nature. However, this response can neither be naïve nor generalised; it cannot place the responsibility for the Anthropocene on every human being equally. That would also reduce the significance of the human struggle to both acknowledge and solve the current climate and nature issues. We propose five dimensions where business schools could advance to foster critical thinking in the Anthropocene: curriculum, institutional practices, academic staff, the educational system, and subjectivity. Research implications: Critical management studies (CMS) and business schools are two important players that can use the Anthropocene-induced perspective shift to think differently about social and environmental issues. Originality/value: We show that CMS can use the Anthropocene shock to reinforce itself and gain greater legitimacy to critically analyse modern methods of organising the human society. Business schools also need to review their current practices for educating future managers who need to be aware of their environmental impact both as human beings and as professionals.

Ensaio sobre a formação e adaptação em Adorno

This article evaluates the issue of formation and adaptation in the context of the bourgeois society, as seen under the lights of Theodor W. Adorno’s thinking, (1903-1969), especially in following the texts: Education and Emancipation (1995); Semiculture Theory (1996) and Dialectic of Enlightenment (1985), aiming at exposing the inherent forceful conditions of the capitalist system that validates the exit of man from the tutelage of divine authority, without, however, bestowing upon him effective autonomy, in the Kantian sense, to self-govern. Such a society chooses scientific knowledge, enhanced by technical-instrumental rationality, as the only valid form of knowledge that will forge a type of subjectivity whose thinking that support it is reified. Education is linked to the interests of the capitalist system to train operators of scientific knowledge to produce goods, without considering the critical reflections that it will provoke on life marked by exploitation and inequalities in this dominating society. &nbsp

Days of the Cavemen? Adorno, Spengler, and the Anatomy of Caesarism

Abstract This article addresses the controversial question of Theodor W. Adorno’s debt to right-wing Zivilisationskritik by a close reading of his essay “Spengler after the Decline” (1950). The article shows that despite Adorno’s harsh polemics against Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918, 1922), he sought to make Spengler’s analysis of Weimar Germany’s undemocratic tendencies—“Caesarism”—serve progressive ends. However, Adorno’s essay was not just an effort at “coming to terms with the past” in Adenauerian West Germany. Reading the essay’s original 1941 version together with Adorno’s correspondence with Max Horkheimer sheds light on Spengler as an overlooked key (next to Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin) to their Dialectic of Enlightenment, written in 1941–44. Adorno’s daring effort to appropriate Spengler’s analysis of Caesarism makes Adorno’s critical theory an asset in understanding today’s authoritarian populism.

Kulturkritik und Reflexionen zum deutschen Kolonialismus in Christian Krachts Roman Imperium

In spite of its ironic posture, Christian Kracht’s novel Imperium (2012) contains a serious criticism of civilization, which is illustrated along the protagonist August Engelhardt. Through the fictionalization of this historical character, the novel critically reflects German colonialism, but also the “German madness” (Setz 2015: 155). This way, Imperium highlights the dialectical dimensions of culture as well as of colonialism and thus calls for a postcolonial reading. The aim of this study is to work out that Kracht’s novel Imperium by means of the fictionalization of the historical figure August Engelhardt offers a postcolonial perspective on the colonial as well as totalitarian ambitions of the Wilhelminian Era. This perspective is intensified through a critical view in sense of the cultural criticism that was developed by Horkheimer and Adorno in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (2006). Doing so, the novel presents the inhuman dimensions of unilateral concepts in a remarkable way. After mapping out the theoretical foundation of the study in the context of Postcolonial German Studies and outlining of the interrelations of cultural criticism and postcolonial approaches, I will investigate the critical dimension of the novel with regard to the progress optimism as well to the German colonial expansion politics at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Thereby, I will concentrate on the ambivalent protagonist August Engelhardt and his strange philosophical ideas, which celebrate the coconut as a sacred fruit. Based on the regression of the protagonist, the subversions of the colonial discourse will be explored with respect to the arguments of Horkheimer and Adorno.