adorno horkheimer dialectic of enlightenment

As such, traditional theory was left, in Jürgen Habermas' words, without 'anything in reserve to which it might appeal and when the forces of production enter into a baneful symbiosis with the relations of production that they were supposed to blow wide open, there is no longer any dynamism upon which critique could base its hope.' :118 For Adorno and Horkheimer, this posed the problem of how to account for the apparent persistence of domination in the absence of the very contradiction that, according to traditional critical theory, was the source of domination itself. Instead the conscious decision of the managing directors executes as results (which are more obligatory than the blindest price-mechanisms) the old law of value and hence the destiny of capitalism.īecause of this, contrary to Marx's famous prediction in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, this shift did not lead to 'an era of social revolution,' but rather to fascism and totalitarianism. One are the objective laws of the market which ruled in the actions of the entrepreneurs and tended toward catastrophe.

The market (as an 'unconscious' mechanism for the distribution of goods) had been replaced by centralized planning. įor Adorno and Horkheimer (relying on the economist Friedrich Pollock's thesis on National Socialism), state intervention in the economy had effectively abolished the tension in capitalism between the 'relations of production' and the 'material productive forces of society,' a tension that, according to traditional theory, constituted the primary contradiction within capitalism.

:242 Furthermore, this ambivalence was rooted in the historical circumstances in which Dialectic of Enlightenment was originally produced: the authors saw National Socialism, Stalinism, state capitalism, and culture industry as entirely new forms of social domination that could not be adequately explained within the terms of traditional theory. Such would give rise to the ' pessimism' of the new critical theory over the possibility of human emancipation and freedom. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the new critical theory, as Adorno and Horkheimer set out to elaborate it in Dialectic of Enlightenment, is a certain ambivalence concerning the ultimate source or foundation of social domination.

Adorno horkheimer dialectic of enlightenment