Enlightenment as Domination
One of the most unsettling and profound arguments to emerge from the Frankfurt School is found in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Written in the shadow of fascism, world war, and the collapse of European civilization, this work challenged the very foundations of modernity’s self-understanding. Its central claim was stark: the Enlightenment, far from being the straightforward triumph of reason over superstition, contained the seeds of its own reversal. Reason, when unmoored from reflection, could become a new form of myth; emancipation could mutate into domination.
The Enlightenment’s project had been to liberate humanity from fear, to master nature through knowledge, and to establish the sovereignty of rational individuals. Yet, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, the drive to mastery, unchecked, turns reason itself into an instrument of control—first over the natural world, then over human beings.
Thus, the story of progress is also the story of regression. In seeking to free itself from myth, reason reverts to mythological patterns of domination, repetition, and blind submission to power.
Myth and Reason: A Shared Origin
The distinction between myth and reason, so often imagined as absolute, is, in the eyes of Adorno and Horkheimer, deeply ambivalent. Both myth and Enlightenment are attempts to make the world intelligible, to control fate through knowledge.
In ancient myth, forces of nature were personified, named, and ritualized, thus tamed. Similarly, the Enlightenment sought to reduce the world to laws, formulas, and quantifiable data. In both cases, the unknown is mastered by being made into something graspable. What changes is not the impulse, but the method.
This continuity reveals a profound irony: in the very effort to escape myth, Enlightenment becomes a kind of new myth, enforcing its own rigid order, sacrificing particularity and nuance for the sake of universality and calculability.
Instrumental Reason and the Loss of Freedom
At the heart of this regression is what the Frankfurt School called "instrumental reason." Rather than asking questions about the good, the true, or the just, reason becomes a tool for achieving ends—any ends—more efficiently. It no longer judges the goals themselves; it merely calculates the best means to reach them.
This narrowing of reason has devastating consequences. It leads to the domination of nature without reflection on the meaning of such domination. It extends into human relationships, treating others as means rather than ends. It shapes social institutions, technology, and culture into mechanisms of control rather than spaces of freedom.
Modernity, then, does not overcome barbarism; it perfects it through rationalization. Auschwitz and the bureaucratic state become not anomalies but horrifying expressions of a rationality emptied of moral content.
The Hope of Critical Reflection
Despite the darkness of this diagnosis, Adorno and Horkheimer did not abandon the project of Enlightenment altogether. Instead, they called for a different kind of reason—self-reflective, critical, and aware of its own historical entanglements.
True enlightenment, they argued, would involve not the blind domination of the world, but reconciliation with it: an acknowledgment of the non-identical, the particular, the suffering that resists reduction to universal categories. It would require a dialectical reason—one that recognizes its own limits and seeks to preserve rather than annihilate difference.
Critical Theory, in this sense, is an attempt to rescue the emancipatory potential of reason from its perversion into a new mythology of domination.
Myth and Reason in the Contemporary World
Today, the dialectic of reason and myth continues to unfold. Technological rationality permeates every corner of life, from algorithms that shape behavior to political discourses that collapse complexity into slogans. Meanwhile, new forms of myth—conspiracy theories, pseudo-science, cults of authenticity—proliferate precisely within societies that pride themselves on their rationality.
The warning of Dialectic of Enlightenment remains urgent: that without vigilant, critical reflection, reason itself can become irrational; that enlightenment without self-critique can turn into new forms of barbarism. To think critically is, therefore, not to abandon reason, but to demand more from it—to insist that it remember its origin in the hope for freedom, not domination.
Next article: Adorno and Horkheimer on Instrumental Rationality and Domination