Диалектика Просвещения: Критика и Судьба Разума

1947 book by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno

Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dialektik der Aufklärung) is a work of philosophy and social criticism written by Frankfurt School philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. The text, published in 1947, is a revised version of what the authors originally had circulated among friends and colleagues in 1944 under the title of Philosophical Fragments (Philosophische Fragmente). One of the core texts of critical theory, Dialectic of Enlightenment explores the socio psychological status quo that had been responsible for what the Frankfurt School considered the failure of the Enlightenment. They argue that its failure culminated in the rise of Fascism, Stalinism, the culture industry and mass consumer capitalism. Rather than liberating humanity as the Enlightenment had promised, they argue it had resulted in the opposite: in totalitarianism, and new forms of barbarism and social domination. Together with Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality (1950) and fellow Frankfurt School member Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man (1964), it has had a major effect on 20th century philosophy, sociology, culture, and politics, especially inspiring the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s.

In the 1969 preface to the 2002 publication, Horkheimer and Adorno wrote that the original was written, "when the end of the National Socialist terror was in sight." One of the distinguishing characteristics of the new critical theory, as Adorno and Horkheimer set out to elaborate it in Dialectic of Enlightenment, is a certain ambivalence concerning the ultimate source or foundation of social domination. For Adorno and Horkheimer (relying on the economist Friedrich Pollock's thesis on National Socialism), state intervention in the economy had effectively abolished the tension in capitalism between the "relations of production" and the "material productive forces of society," a tension that, according to traditional theory, constituted the primary contradiction within capitalism. The market (as an "unconscious" mechanism for the distribution of goods) had been replaced by centralized planning. For Adorno and Horkheimer, this posed the problem of how to account for the apparent persistence of domination in the absence of the very contradiction that, according to traditional critical theory, was the source of domination itself. Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of positivism has been criticized as too broad; they are particularly critiqued for interpreting Ludwig Wittgenstein as a positivist—at the time only his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus had been published, not his later works—and for failing to examine critiques of positivism from within analytic philosophy. To characterize this history, Horkheimer and Adorno draw on a wide variety of material, including the philosophical anthropology contained in Marx's early writings, centered on the notion of "labor;" Nietzsche's genealogy of morality, and the emergence of conscience through the renunciation of the will to power; Freud's account in Totem and Taboo of the emergence of civilization and law in murder of the primordial father; and ethnological research on magic and rituals in primitive societies; as well as myth criticism, philology, and literary analysis. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argue that antisemitism is a deeply rooted, irrational phenomenon that stems from the failure of the Enlightenment project and the inherent contradictions of bourgeois society. They argue that Jews serve as a universal scapegoat onto which individuals and societies project their deepest fears, anxieties, and neuroses. According to their analysis, the complex and often contradictory nature of modern life generates a sense of alienation, powerlessness, and psychological distress. Unable to confront these feelings directly, people seek to externalize them by identifying a tangible "other" to blame for their problems. The Jews, with their historically marginalized status and perceived association with the disruptive forces of modernity, become an ideal target for this projection. These homogenized cultural products are used to manipulate mass society into docility and passivity. The introduction of the radio, a mass medium, no longer permits its listener any mechanism of reply, as was the case with the telephone. Instead, listeners are not subjects anymore but passive receptacles exposed "in authoritarian fashion to the same programs put out by different stations." By associating the Enlightenment and Totalitarianism with Marquis de Sade's works—especially Juliette, in excursus II—the text also contributes to the pathologization of sadomasochist desires, as discussed by historian of sexuality Alison Moore.

The book was first published as Philosophische Fragmente in New York in 1944, by the Institute for Social Research, which had relocated from Frankfurt am Main ten years earlier. A revised version was published as Dialektik der Aufklärung in Amsterdam by Querido in 1947. It was reissued in Frankfurt by S. Fischer in 1969, with a new preface by the authors. There have been two English translations: the first by John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972; reissues by Verso from 1979 reverse the order of the authors' names), and another, based on the definitive text from Horkheimer's collected works, by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).