You're viewing as a guest. Sign in to save progress and pick up where you left off.
Step 4 of 7~8 min read~34 min left
Dialectic of Enlightenment: The Core Claims
Examine the key arguments of Adorno and Horkheimer alongside the most important critical responses.
“Adorno and Horkheimer: 'Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.' [...] On the culture industry: 'Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought by those who want to escape the mechanized work process so that they can cope with it again. But at the same time mechanization has such power over leisure and its happiness, so profoundly determines the fabrication of amusement goods, that the off-duty worker can experience nothing but after-images of the work process itself.' [...] Adorno on negative dialectics: 'To use the strength of the subject to break through the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity... The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy.' — Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/1947); Adorno, Negative Dialectics (1966); SEP 'Theodor Adorno'”