Learning from the Power of Things Labour, Civilization and Emancipation in Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (original) (raw)

This article proposes a novel reading of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's emblematic book Dialectic of Enlightenment(1947). Horkheimer and Adorno took as their starting point the observation that modern liberal, human and social progress has tipped over into a new form of barbarism but explicitly refused to develop it into a rejection of the enlightenment and its values as such. Instead, the dialectical view seeks even in the darkest moment of the failure of civilization, which is here epitomized in the Holocaust, reasons to defend a self-reflective, more enlightened form of human civilization. The dialectical theory does not reject but rearticulates the idea of progress that remains central to most forms of liberal and socialist theory. One of the central questions is, under what conditions do the instruments of enlightenment and civilization, including scientific and technological rationality, social organisation and general productivity, serve either emancipation or barbarism. Warding off the positivistic attack on any form of metaphysics and utopian thinking, Horkheimer and Adorno emphasised the need for enlightenment to be based on non-empiricist, reality-transcending, critical thinking in order to be in the service of emancipation rather than domination. The human mind atrophies when deprived of its freedom of movement. The more abstract, philosophical argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment is developed through several more historically specific materials, one of which is the interpretation of modern antisemitism. Horkheimer and Adorno combine in this context a Marxist analysis of aspects of continuity between liberal and fascist governance, based on the concepts of the commodity-form and the wage-form of modern social relations, with an