xvi Preface(1944 and 1947) superstition,that system is preparing arid ground for the greedy accep tance of charlatanism and superstition. Just as prohibition has always ensured the admission of the poisonous product, the blocking of the the oretical imagination has paved the way for political delusion. Even when people have not already succumbed to such delusion, they are deprived by the mechanisms of censorship, both the external ones and those implant- ed within them, of the means of resisting it The aporia which faced us in our work thus proved to be the first matter we had to investigate: the self-destruction of enlightenment. We have no doubt--and herein lies our petitio principii--that freedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking. We believe we have perceived with equal clarity, ho owever at very concept of that think- ing, no less than the concrete historical forms, the institutions of society with which it is intertwined, already contains the germ of the regression which is taking place everywhere today. If enlightenment does not assim- ilate reflection on this regressive moment, it seals its own fate. By leaving ration of the destructive side of progress to its enemies, thought in its headlong* rush into pragmatism is forfeiting its sublating character and therefore its relation to truth. In the mysterious willingness of the technologically educated masses to fall under the ell of any despotism in its self-destructive affinity to nationalist paranoia, in all this uncompre- tended senselessness the weakness of contemporary theoretical under- standing is evident We believe that in these fragments we have contributed to such understanding by showing that the cause of enlightenments relapse into mythology is to be sought not so much in the nationalist, pagan, or other modern mythologies concocted specifically to cause such a relapse as in the fear of truth which petrifies enlightenment itself. Both these terms enlightenment and truth, are to be understood as pertaining not merely to ntellectual history but also to current reality. Just as enlightenment ex- presses the real movement of bourgeois society as a whole from the per spective of the idea embodied in its personalities and institutions, truth refers not merely to rational"consciousness but equally to the form it takes in reality. The loyal son of modern civilization's fear of departing from the facts,which even in their perception are turned into cliches by the pre- vailing usages in science, business, and politics, is exactly the same as the fear of social deviation. Those usages also define the concept of clarity in
Preface(1944 and 1947) xvii language and thought to which art, literature, and philosophy must con form today. By tabooing any thought which sets out negatively from the facts and from the prevailing modes of thought as obscure, convoluted, and preferably foreign, that concept holds mind captive in ever deeper blindness. It is in the nature of the calamitous situation existing today that even the most honorable reformer who recommends renewal in threadbare language reinforces the existing order he seeks to break by taking over its worn-out categorial apparatus and the pernicious power-philosophy lying behind it. False clarity is only another name for myth. Myth was always obscure and luminous at once. It has always been distinguished by its familiarity and its exemption from the work of concepts The enslavement to nature of people today cannot be separated from social progress. The increase in economic productivity which creates the conditions for a more just world also affords the technical apparatus and the social groups controlling it a disproportionate advantage over the rest of the population. The individual is entirely nullified in face of the eco- nomic powers. These powers are taking society's domination over nature to unimagined heights. While individuals as such are vanishing before the apparatus they serve, they are provided for by that apparatus and better than ever before. In the unjust state of society the powerlessness and pla bility of the masses increase* with the quantity of goods allocated to them The materially considerable and socially paltry rise in the standard of liv ing of the lower classes is reflected in the hypocritical propagation of intel lect. Intellect's true concern is a negation of reification. It must perish when it is solidified into a cultural asset and handed out for consumption purposes. The flood of precise information and brand-new amusements make people smarter and more stupid at once What is at issue here is not culture as a value, as understood by ics of civilization such as Huxley, Jaspers, and Ortega y Gasset, but the necessity for enlightenment to reflect on itself if humanity is not to be totally betrayed. What is at stake is not conservation of the past but the fulfillment of past hopes. Today, however,*the past is being continued as destruction of the past. If, up to the nineteenth century, respectable edu cation was a privilege paid for by the increased sufferings of the unedu- cated,in the twentieth the hygienic factory is bought with the melting down of all cultural entities in the gigantic crucible. That might not even be so high a price as those defenders of culture believe if the bargain sale
xviii Preface(r944 and 1947) of culture did not contribute to converting economic achievements into their opposite. Under the given circumstances the gifts of fortune themselves ecome elements of misfortune If, in the absence of the social subject, the volume of goods took the form of so-called overproduction in domestic economic crises in the preceding period, today, thanks to the enthrone ment of powerful groups as that social subject, it is producing the inter- national threat of fascism: progress is reverting to regression. That the hygienic factory and everything pertaining to it, Volkswagen and the sports palace, are obtusely liquidating metaphysics does not matter in itself, but that these things are themselves becoming metaphysics, an ide ological curtain 'within the social whole, behind which real doom is gath ering, does matter. That is the basic premise of our fragments The first essay, the theoretical basis of those which follow, seeks to gain greater understanding of the intertwinement of rationality and social reality, as well as of the intertwinement, inseparable from the former, of nature and the mastery of nature. The critique of enlightenment given in this section is intended to prepare a positive concept of enlightenment which liberates it from its entanglement in blind domination The critical part of the first essay can be broadly summed up in two theses: Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to my- thology. These theses are worked out in relation to specific subjects in the two excurses. The first traces the dialectic of myth and enlightenment in the Odyssey, as one of the earliest representative documents of bourgeoi Western civilization. It focuses primarily on the concepts of sacrifice and renunciation,through which both the difference between and the unity of mythical nature and enlightened mastery of nature become apparent. The second excursus is concerned with Kant, Sade, and Nietzsche, whose works represent the implacable consummation of enlightenment. This section shows how the subjugation of everything natural to the sovereign subject culminates in the domination of what is blindly objective and nat ural. This tendency levels all the antitheses of bourgeois thought, espe cially that between moral rigor and absolute amorality The section"The Culture Industry"shows the regression of enlight enment to ideology which is graphically expressed in film and radio. Here, enlightenment consists primarily in the calculation of effects and in the echnology of production and dissemination; the specific content of the
Preface(i944 and 1947) ideology is exhausted in the idolization of the existing order and of the power by which the technology is controlled. In the discussion of this con- tradiction the culture industry is taken more seriously than it might itself wish to be. But because its appeal to its own commercial character, its con- fession of its diminished truth, has long since become an excuse with hich it evades responsibility for its lies, our analysis is directed at the claim objectively contained in its products to be aesthetic formations and thus representations of truth. It demonstrates the dire state of society by the invalidity of that claim. Still more than the others, the section on the culture industry is fragmentary The discussion, in the form of theses, of"Elements of Anti- Semitism"deals with the reversion of enlightened civilization to barbarism in reality. The not merely theoretical but practical tendency toward self- destruction has been inherent in rationality from the first, not only in the present phase when it is emerging nakedly. For this reason a philosophical prehistory of anti-Semitism is sketched. Its"irrationalism"derives from the nature of the dominant reason and of the world corresponding to its image. The"elements"are directly related to empirical research by the Institute of Social Research, *the foundation set up and kept alive by Felix Weil, without which not only our studies but the good part of the theo- retical work of German emigrants carried forward despite Hitler would not have been possible. We wrote the first three theses jointly with Leo Lowenthal, with whom we have collaborated on many scholarly questions nce the first In the last section we publish notes and sketches which, in part, form part of the ideas in the preceding sections, without having found a place in them, and in part deal provisionally with problems of future work. Most of them relate to a dialectical anthropology. Los Angeles, California, May 1944 The book contains no essential changes to the text completed during the war. Only the last thesis of"Elements of Anti-Semitism"was added sub- Max Horkheimer Theodor W. adorno
The Concept of Enlightenment Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the e advance o thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity. Enlightenment's program was the disenchantment of the world. "It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowl- edge e. Bacon, he father of experimental philosophy, "brought these mo- tifs together. He despised the exponents of tradition, who substituted be lief for knowledge and were as unwilling to doubt as they were reckless in supplying answers. All this, he said, stood in the way of the happy match between the mind of man and the nature of things, "with the result that humanity was unable to use its knowledge for the betterment of its con- dition. Such inventions as had been made-Bacon cites printing, artillery, and the compass--had been arrived at more by chance than by systemat- ic enquiry into nature. Knowledge obtained through such enquiry would not only be exempt from the influence of wealth and power but would establish man as the master of nature: Therefore, no doubt, the sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge; wherein many things are reserved, which kings with their treasure cannot buy, nor with their force command; their spials and intelligencers can give no news of them, their seamer and discoverers cannot sail where they grow: now we govern nature in opinions, but we are thrall unto her in necessity: but if we would be led by her in invention we should command her by action.2