Dialectic of Enlightenment

First published in 1947, this iconic book of the “Frankfurt School” could not be a study of AI and 21st-century technologies per see.

Instead it is a phantasmic explainer of how the mistakes of the past impinge on our humanity and the prospects for a better future. "What we had set out to do," Adorno and Horkheimer famously wrote in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism."

With spectacular erudition, the authors clearly show how the terror regime of the Nazis was… show more.

This is the most important single work of Frankfurt School critical theory.

It starts from the question: What went wrong with modernity such that modernization produced not utopia, but the horrors of authoritarianism, genocide, and mass annihilation? When I first read this book in graduate school, it blew my mind.

It is a wonderfully seductive, complicated, dialectical, critique of the project of enlightenment and its relationship with myth, instrumental rationality, and the domination of nature. Basically, it provides a fascinating account of the discontents and contradictions within modernity itself.

While I think a lot of its argument that is right,… show more.

The standard liberal (and neoliberal) response to those who complain that enlightenment and progress leave behind precisely those people whom they are supposed to help the most has been to double down and demand more progress. In this 20th century classic of political-sociological analysis, Horkheimer and Adorno show that the concept of enlightenment as interpreted by the liberal politicians, and as touted by them to the masses whom they hold in thrall, is self-undermining.