Review of Adorno and Horkheimer's The dialectic of enlightenment

Authors Avatar

Book Review:

Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’

  and  from the ‘Frankfurt School’ of thought, with their ‘collective of understanding reality’, were both educated German Jews. Who took an examining look at the ‘Enlightenment’. Written in 1947 at the

In their book, they synthesis both Freud and Marx, accepting both theories as being feasable. They accept the Marxist approach whereby economics is the sole aspect of society, the class struggle, commodity and the exchange of goods. However they recognise that this is merely one side and that there is the spiritual being which in itself needs catering for. The needs and desires of the individuals that are repressed by the society and constraints in which we live in. The Psychic development of the individual from birth, as it grows and learns how to conform to society.

Freud and Marx both agreed however that conflict was the ‘motor’ of history, although differing on the conflict levels. For Freud it is the ‘individual’s conflict with society’ and for Marx it is as we know the neverending ‘class conflict’. The importance of these two philosophical thinkers is that they have pathed the way for Adorno and Horkheimer to understand the both the ‘individual’ and ‘society’, by incorporating the two.

The three main aspects to their approach are: The economic life of society (Marx), the psychic development of the individual (Freud) and the transformation in the realm of culture, which is to be understood as technology, clothes etc. and the wide range of culture within society. This transformation the acknowledgment that culture and history is forever changing and does not stay still fits perfectly in with the theory of the Dialectics. The thesis, anti – thesis approach adopted by Marx but introduced by Hegel.

Join now!

Adorno and Horkheimer take the ‘Enlightenment’ realising it was useful but somewhere along the lines it went wrong. What is important to note here is that they are both German Jews, from the Frankfurt school of thought, writing at the time of World War two in particular the time of the Holocaust, this was as an engagement of their own contemporary reality. These actions contradicted everything the Enlightenment from Hegel’s perspective had foretold, that apparently by that stage in History all would have been well with the world. For if everyone was meant to be in a state of ...

This is a preview of the whole essay