Dialectic of Enlightenment

A set of linked essays written by two Frankfurt School exiles in California during the Second World War, first circulated in 1944 as Philosophical Fragments and published in book form in 1947. Its question is why a civilisation that set out to free people through reason produced fascism, mass culture and new forms of domination. The opening essay argues that myth was already a form of enlightenment, and that enlightenment, by reducing nature and people to what can be calculated and controlled, turns back into myth. Two excursuses follow: one reads Odysseus as an early model of the self that survives by cunning and self-denial; the other sets Kant beside Sade and Nietzsche to show reason cut loose from any binding ends. The chapter on the culture industry describes film, radio and popular music as standardised products that train people to conform. A chapter on antisemitism and a series of notes and sketches close the book.

It is the central text of the Frankfurt School and the origin of the idea of the culture industry, still the starting point for any critique of instrumental reason, mass media and the costs of progress.