THEODOR 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 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG USA: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 versobooks.com 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