Table Of ContentTHEODOR ADORNO and Max Horkheimer were the founders of the approach to
social analysis which has become known as ‘Critical Theory’. Together at the
Institute for Social Research in Germany before and after the Second World War
– as well as in exile in the US during the Hitler years – they sought to direct an
interdisciplinary programme of research into the contradictions and pathologies
of modernity. Blending the abstraction of philosophy with the concreteness of
empirical data, and drawing on disciplines such as sociology, psychoanalysis,
and political economy, they developed a methodology that was quite distinct
from positivism and sensitive to hitherto underexplored areas such as the mass
entertainment industry and manifestations of collective consciousness.
Although it was written more than a decade after the project of Critical
Theory began with Horkheimer’s directorship at the Institute in 1931, Dialectic
of Enlightenment can be read as a foundational text for the school, so rich is it in
themes and insights that resonate throughout their work. Launching an assault on
the hallowed reputation of the Enlightenment, which, for them, had destroyed
itself by transmuting itself from a critical philosophy into an affirmation of the
status quo and its dominant positivist and pragmatist philosophies, Adorno and
Horkheimer focused particularly on the role of technology and the domination of
nature. Prefiguring later critiques of modernity, especially in the
environmentalist movement, the authors posited that myth and enlightenment,
far from being polar opposites, were intricately linked, and that the notion of
irresistible progress could only revert to irresistible regression.
THEODOR ADORNO was born in Germany in 1903 and died there in 1969. He
studied music with Alban Berg in Vienna and then became associated with the
Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in the 1930s. During the 1940s,
Adorno lived in California, and after the war he returned to Germany, and in
1959 became director of the Institute and a Professor of Sociology and
Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. His other publications in English
include Negative Dialectics (1973), Minima Moralia (1974), In Search of
Wagner (1981), Culture Industry (1991), Quasi Una Fantasia (1992), Hegel:
Three Studies (1993), The Stars Down to Earth (1995), and Aesthetic Theory
(1997). MAX HORKHEIMER was born in Germany in 1895 and died there in 1973.
He became a professor at the University of Frankfurt and was director of the
Institute from 1931 until his retirement in 1959, although during the war years he
lived in California. His other publications in English include Critical Theory
(1975), Eclipse of Reason (1975), Critique of Instrumental Reason (1976), Dawn
and Decline (1978) and Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993).
VERSO
CLASSICS
The last few decades have seen an immense outpouring of works of theory and
criticism, but, as the number of titles has increased dramatically, it has become
more and more difficult to find one’s way around this vast body of literature and
to distinguish between those works of real and enduring value and those of a
more ephemeral nature. The Verso Classics series will rise to the challenge by
taking stock of the last few decades of contemporary critical thought and
reissuing, in an elegant paperback format and at affordable prices, those books
which genuinely constitute original and important intellectual contributions.
Many of these works are currently out of print or difficult to obtain: Verso
Classics will bring them back into the public domain, building a collection
which will become the ‘essential left library’.
1. LOUIS ALTHUSSER For Marx
2. PERRY ANDERSON Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism 3. TERRY
EAGLETON The Function of Criticism 4. FREDRIC JAMESON Late
Marxism
5. JACQUELINE ROSE Sexuality in the Field of Vision 6. RAYMOND
WILLIAMS The Politics of Modernism 7. WALTER BENJAMIN Charles
Baudelaire 8. WALTER BENJAMIN One-Way Street
9. ROY BHASKAR A Realist Theory of Science 10. LUCIEN FEBVRE AND HENRI-
JEAN MARTIN The Coming of the Book 11. FRANCO MORETTI Signs
Taken for Wonders 12. RAYMOND WILLIAMS Problems in Materialism and
Culture 13. GEORG LUKÁCS Lenin
14. LOUIS ALTHUSSER AND ÉTIENNE BALIBAR Reading Capital 15. THEODOR
ADORNO AND MAX HORKHEIMER Dialectic of Enlightenment 16. ERIK OLIN
WRIGHT Classes
Dialectic of Enlightenment
THEODOR W. ADORNO
& MAX HORKHEIMER
Translated by
John Cumming
First published as Dialektik der Aufklarung © Social Studies Association, Inc., New York, 1944
German reissue © S, Fischer Verlag GmbH 1969
English translation first published by Herder & Herder, New York, 1972
© Herder & Herder, Inc., 1972
First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 1973
First published by Verso/NLB 1979
© NLB 1979
This edition published by Verso 1997
© Verso 1997
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Reprinted 2016
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-679-3 (PB) ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-680-9
(EBK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this
book is available from the Library of Congress Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0
4YY
CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION
INTRODUCTION
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
ELEMENTS OF ANTI-SEMITISM: LIMITS OF ENLIGHTENMENT
NOTES AND DRAFTS
END NOTES
For Friedrich Pollock
PREFACE TO THE
NEW EDITION
THE first edition of The Dialectic of Enlightenment was published by Querido of
Amsterdam in 1947. The book made its reputation only by degrees, and has now
been out of print for a long time. We have decided to reissue it after more than
twenty years, not only in answer to many requests but because we believe that
not a few of the ideas it contains are still apposite to the times and have to a large
extent determined our later theory. No outsider will find it easy to discern how
far we are both responsible for every sentence. We jointly dictated lengthy
sections; and the vital principle of the Dialectic is the tension between the two
intellectual temperaments conjoined in it.
We would not now maintain without qualification every statement in the
book: that would be irreconcilable with a theory which holds that the core of
truth is historical, rather than an unchanging constant to be set against the
movement of history. The work was written when the end of the Nazi terror was
within sight; nevertheless, in not a few places the reality of our times is
formulated in a way no longer appropriate to contemporary experience. And yet
—even at that time—our assessment of the transition to the world of the
administered life was not too simplistic.
In a period of political division into immense power-blocks, set objectively
upon collison, the sinister trend continues. The conflicts in the Third World and
the renewed growth of totalitarianism are just as little mere historical episodes
as, according to the Dialectic, was Fascism in its time. Today critical thought
(which does not abandon its commitment even in the face of progress) demands
support for the residues of freedom, and for tendencies toward true humanism,
even if these seem powerless in regard to the main course of history.
The development toward total integration recognized in this book is
interrupted, but not abrogated. It threatens to advance beyond dictatorships and
wars. The prognosis of the related conversion of enlightenment into positivism,
the myth of things as they actually are, and finally the identification of intellect
and that which is inimical to the spirit, has been overwhelmingly confirmed. Our
conception of history does not presume any dispensation from it; nor does it
imply a positivistic search for information. It is a critique of philosophy, and
therefore refuses to abandon philosophy.
The book was written in America, whence we returned to Germany,
convinced that there we could achieve more, in practice as well as in theory, than
elsewhere. Together with Friedrich Pollock (to whom this book was originally
dedicated on his fiftieth, and now his sixty-fifth, birthday), we have once again
built up the Institut für Sozialforschung in an attempt to develop the conception
formulated in the Dialectic. In the extension of our theory and the accompanying
mutual experiences, Gretel Adorno has been a precious helper.
We have been far more sparing with alterations to the text than is usual with
new editions of works published some decades before. We did not want to
retouch what we had written—not even the obviously inadequate places. To
have brought the text up to date would, ultimately, have demanded nothing less
than a new book. That today it is more a question of preserving freedom, and of
extending and developing it, instead—however indirectly—of accelerating the
advance toward an administered world, is something that we have also
emphasized in our later writings. Essentially, we have restricted our revision to
the correction of printer’s errors and the like. Such restraint tends to afford the
book the status of documentation; yet we hope that it has more than that to offer.
Frankfurt am Main MAX HORKHEIMER
THEODOR W. ADORNO
April 1969
