Dialectic of Enlightenment [Anglais] [Broché]

"Dialectic of Enlightenment", one of the most celebrated texts of the Frankfurt School, endeavours to answer why modernity, instead of fulfilling the promises of the Enlightenment (e.g. progress, reason, order) has sunk into a new barbarism. Drawing on their own work on the "culture industry", as well as the ideas of the key thinkers of the Enlightenment project, (Descartes, Newton, Kant) Horkheimer and Adorno explain how the Enlightenment's orientation towards rational calculability and man's domination of a disenchanted nature evinces a reversion to myth, and is responsible for the reified structures of modern administered society, which has grown to resemble a new enslavement. Furthermore, Horkheimer's and Adorno's treatise was one of the most ambitious attempts to synthesise Marxist economic analysis with Freudian psychoanalysis, and is developed with much complexity and skill. Their philosophical and psychological critique of the Enlightenment concepts of reason and nature (which they identify as the loci of domination) spans almost the entire history of Western thought up until recent times, from Homer to Nietzsche. The book was written in 1944, during a phase of the war when the threat of Fascist victory still hung ominously over Europe, and when Horkheimer and Adorno themselves had to flee Germany to America. "Dialectic of Enlightenment" thus represents one of the most pessimistic strands of Marxist thought, giving up all expectations of a people's revolution in Western Europe. This was, in addition to the outbreak of the Second World War, due to the meteoric rise of extremely right-wing reactionary parties in the twenties, and their subsequent popularity, which ruled out by fiat any chance of a popular support for the left. The proletariat, instead of embracing the cause of the people's revolution, opted to give their vote to the Fascists. In their psychoanalytic investigation of this phenomena, Horkheimer and Adorno identify the rise of Fascism with the return of the repressed.

This Amazon page is a disaster. The sample pages are from the earlier, terrible translation published by Continuum. One of the reader reviews is (as it notes) actually a review of the earlier translation. What is it doing here?? In fact, all of the reviews predate the publication of the new translation.

By all means read the Dialectic of Enlightenment! But be sure to use only the new translation published by Stanford.

These comments refer to the old Continuum edition (John Cumming, translator), NOT to the Stanford edition (Edmund Jephcott, translator), which is a fine translation ...

While not wishing to detract from what has been said about the importance of this book, it is worth mentioning that the English translation is scandalously bad and in need of replacement. I've had occasion to make extensive comparisons between the German original and the translation and the results are not encouraging. Much is simply flat-out wrong (e.g., sometimes the translator mistakes one German word for another) even more is unnecessarily clumsy. While Horkheimer and Adorno adopted a rather dense style of writing, nothing they produced is quite as cumbersome as what readers of this translation have had to endure.

One can sympathize with the translator -- he did the translation at a time when very little by Horkheimer and Adorno was in English and it appears that he worked under a rather tight schedule (it is possible to find errors piling up on a page and then suddenly ceasing -- suggesting that the poor fellow took a break and came back later on, with happier results). But there is no forgiving the publisher for leaving this text uncorrected for so long despite a long-standing consensus among students of the Frankfurt School that this is a deeply flawed translation. That anything of the power of the original makes it through the muck of this translation is a testimony to the force of Horkheimer and Adorno's ideas.

A new translation is long overdue. Until then, readers coming to the work of the Frankfurt School might want to seek out Max Horkheimer's Eclipse of Reason, a summary of the argument elaborated here which Horkheimer delivered in English at Columbia University at about the same time of as the publication of the German original of this book.