Work · Socialism, Anarchism, Marxism & Critical Theory
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology – the culture industry.
Introduction
Horkheimer and Adorno wrote the book in exile in California between 1941 and 1944, partly from conversations noted down by Gretel Adorno. A mimeographed edition titled Philosophical Fragments circulated in 1944; the book appeared in Amsterdam in 1947. Besides the opening essay on the concept of enlightenment, it contains an excursus reading Odysseus as a prototype of the bourgeois subject, one on Kant, Sade and Nietzsche, a chapter on the culture industry as mass deception and one on the elements of antisemitism. Little noticed for two decades, it circulated among students in pirated copies in the 1960s before a new edition appeared in 1969.
Connections
Builds on
- On the Genealogy of Morality1887 · Friedrich Nietzsche
- History and Class Consciousness1923 · Georg Lukács
Criticizes
- An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?1784 · Immanuel Kant
Taken up in
- One-Dimensional Man1964 · Herbert Marcuse
Criticized in
- The Theory of Communicative Action1981 · Jürgen Habermas
- The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity1985 · Jürgen Habermas
More works by Theodor W. Adorno
- 1951Minima Moralia
Appears in
- Journey ‘Hegel’s Heirs’ · Stop 7 of 10
- Journey ‘Philosophy under National Socialism’ · Stop 9 of 10
As of November 2026 · Improve this page · How Agora is made