Dialectic of the Enlightenment is acollection of essays by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno published in 1944 under the name Philosophical Fragments. It is considered one of the fundamental and most widely received works of Adorno and Horkheimer, the Frankfurt School and critical theory.
Chapter overview of Dialectic of the Enlightenment
preface
The preface to Dialectic of the Enlightenment explains the reason for the book's creation - Friedrich Pollock's fiftieth birthday - in view of the “collapse of bourgeois civilization” and the “self-destruction of the Enlightenment”, which the articles of the book are intended to help understand. The criticism exercised on the Enlightenment is intended to “prepare a positive concept of it that will free it from its entanglement in blind rule”.Chapter 1: The Concept of Enlightenment
Here Adorno and Horkheimer discuss the theoretical foundations of the concept of "Enlightenment". They note the dialectic of nature and the domination over nature as the myth and the Enlightenment. Chapter 1 also offers the hypothesis is formulated as to how the enlightened rationality is linked to social reality - a reality of the rulers and the ruled.Chapter 2: ( Excursus I) Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment
Based on the “Odyssey” By Homer, an early testimony to western civilization, the dialectic of myth and enlightenment is interpreted as an already premodern confrontation with a mythically understood nature through elementary pre-forms of an enlightened mastery of naturem, all symbolized by Odysseus's journey.Chapter 3: (Excursus II) Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality
In a comparison of Kant with de Sade and Nietzsche, it is argued that enlightened reason, through the “submission of everything natural to the autocratic subject”, cannot be moral, as Kant wished, but amoral.Chapter 4: Culture Industry - Enlightenment as mass deception
In chapter 4 Adorno and Horkheimer present their famous notion of "culture industry", They assert that the increase in economic productivity progresses in the modern age into an economization of all areas of life and thus ultimately ends in a “sell-out of culture”. Meaning is replaced by the calculated stupidity of amusement and economic events are glorified unreflectively as the outflow of the objectified power of logical rationalization processes will.Chapter 5: Elements of Anti-Semitism. Limits of the Enlightenment
For Adorno and Horkheimer, the return to barbarism is seen as an integral part of modernity that cannot simply be split off. On the basis of the history of ideas of anti-Semitism, they claim that ruling reason is inherently irrationalism, which in fascist thought gained an anti-civilizational expression.Chapter 6: Notes and Sketches
The final chapter of Dialectic of the Enlightenment brings together unfinished thoughts, partly derived from the previous sections, most of which relate to a “dialectical anthropology ”.Here you can find a simple explanantion of Dialectic of Enlightenment