By GILLIAN ROSE*
Considerations on the book by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno
The work Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno was written ten years after the writings considered so far [in the book Marxist Modernism – Introductory lectures of Frankfurt School critical theory]. They wrote it in the 1940s. The books we have discussed so far – by György Lukács, Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin – were all written in the 1930s. In them, they criticize the positions of these three philosophers in the fields of philosophy of history, the theory of late capitalist society and aesthetics.
Now, to recapitulate the points made earlier, we reaffirm: György Lukács saw the period of fascism's success as a period of disintegration and decay; Ernst Bloch, on the other hand, saw it as a period of disintegration but regarded it as a moment of transition; and Walter Benjamin, on the other hand, considered that the new forms of technology of the period had a liberating potential, but on the other hand, stressed that the class enemy had not ceased to be victorious.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, generalizing not only from the experience of fascism in Germany but also from their experience of exile in America, thought of this period—that is, the 1930s and 1940s—as one in which new forms of domination were being consolidated, as a period of increasing stability, not of disintegration.
They assumed that new technologies would be used for regressive, not progressive, purposes. Far from providing an ahistorical account, they were in fact trying to isolate the institutions that they predicted would persist after the defeat of fascism. Indeed, they even went back to classical Greece to illustrate specific syndromes. Now, this is a fairly standard procedure in social analysis: in order to bring to light a syndrome that has become dominant in contemporary society, one tries to discuss a simpler society or a primitive society where this syndrome can be analyzed more clearly. The fact that Adorno made, in the conceptual elaboration of the dialectic of enlightenment, a return to Homer should not prevent us from seeing that the critique made in this way applies essentially to late capitalist society.
What does this curious title mean, Dialectics of Enlightenment? By Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno were not trying to refer primarily to the eighteenth century. There are only one or two references to Voltaire in this book. I think they were thinking of a very famous article by Kant—it is also very short—called What is Enlightenment?? This article by Kant – although I do not claim here to explain it – presents four characteristics that are associated with the kind of rationalism that Kant and other writers conceived of as liberating: (i) a notion of rationalism that rejected the authority of tradition or myth and that tended to be anticlerical. (ii) a notion of rationalism that emphasized the autonomy of the individual and his right to make his own decisions. (iii) a notion of rationalism that promised increasing control over the natural world, based on the natural sciences. (iv) a notion of rationalism that promised an increasingly just organization of society.
These were the original promises that the concept of rationalism, on which the Enlightenment depends, seemed to offer. Associated with this notion of Enlightenment is a notion posited in Max Weber's sociology of rationality, especially when he speaks of the disenchantment of the world.
By this, Weber meant that, in modern capitalist society, legal and rational institutions would be the paradigmatic institutions of authority, replacing the traditional authority of pre-capitalist society. Horkheimer and Adorno also included in the conception of the Enlightenment this reference to Weber's sociology insofar as it deals with legal and rational institutions.
This is the ideal of enlightenment, but what did Horkheimer and Adorno mean by “dialectics of enlightenment”? What they meant by this is not what dialectics means in general. As is well known, ‘dialectics’ is a very slippery word – I will not therefore attempt to say here what it means. But what “dialectics” means in this sentence – dialectics of enlightenment – is this: instead of these ideals of enlightenment bringing liberation, these social forms gave rise to a new kind of domination; they also brought about a new form of slavery and thus – they are of course playing with this word here – new myths.
I repeat: instead of bringing a new kind of liberation, something that these ideals originally seemed to promise, they turned into new forms of control and social domination – they created modes of slavery. Because of this, because they turned into the opposite of what they promised, Horkheimer and Adorno explained that the original ideas had become a new kind of myth. Now, enlightenment should be a notion opposed to myth…
The rationalism of control over nature became a means of political control over men, as well as weapons of destruction. Instead of a just organization of society based on formal abstract notions of equality, the organization of society based on enlightenment turned into new ways of perpetuating real inequality. Instead of the mental autonomy that had been promised, new ways of controlling the minds of others were developed, new forms of propaganda and lies.
Instead of the emergence of rational and legal institutions, there was the growth of forms of control that were in fact unintelligible to those who submitted to them. The Enlightenment had turned into its opposite. As I said, while Horkheimer and Adorno traced it back to the eighteenth century, and even to Homer, they were clearly concerned with the same period that Bloch and Lukács were looking at. They rethought it after ten years, and it is quite significant that they did so in America rather than in Europe.
What are the consequences of this position for political analysis? Now, I will say something that is a little scandalous. This view of Horkheimer and Adorno is in opposition to what has become a standard but – I think – extremely easy and functional liberal explanation of fascism. I will give an example of the kind of book in which this explanation is given. It is the one by Ralf Dahrendorf called Society and Democracy in Germany, published in 1965.
Ralf Dahrendorf, in this book, gives an explanation of why fascism occurred in Germany, which seems quite normal. This normal explanation says that in Germany (as opposed, say, to what happened in Britain or France or even in other countries) there was a divorce between the late and extremely rapid development of capitalism – as we know, the industrial revolution in Germany only really occurred at the end of the 19th century – and the archaic feudal political institutions that were maintained in Germany.
In other words, he argued in this book that there was a lack of a liberal tradition in Germany. There had been a very rapid development of capitalism without a liberal-democratic political structure. This is a very standard explanation of this rapid industrial development that led to the collapse of civilization into fascism. Fascism, in this view, became a mode of modernization in Germany.
The Frankfurt School's theorizing, with its notion of the dialectic of enlightenment, represents an enormous challenge to the liberal position in the following sense: here the Frankfurt School—by which I mean, of course, Horkheimer and Adorno—is saying that it is capitalist rationality itself that produces and reproduces forms of barbarism; that fascism cannot be seen as a unique German collapse due to the asymmetry in Germany's social institutions, but that it is inherent in the logic of late capitalism.
That's one of the reasons why this title, Dialectic of Enlightenment, has proved so politically controversial. This is really what this notion of the dialectic of enlightenment is asserting: that precisely the aspects of eighteenth-century culture of which we are most proud are those that turned into the kind of social institutions that could produce fascism. Fascism cannot be seen as a collapse of these ideals, but as part of their logic.
As can be seen, this theory of the dialectic of enlightenment is not based on a class analysis. Instead, Horkheimer and Adorno – and in this sense they are very similar to Lukács, Bloch and Benjamin – set out to analyse the development of the forms of domination that they believed had prevented the formation of class consciousness. The use of the concept of mass society should be seen in this light. The concept of mass society has reactionary connotations. It is also important to see, in addition, that in this book the emphasis is placed on why classical proletarian class consciousness did not develop.
In particular, the analysis of these forms of domination occurs in the chapter entitled “The Culture Industry”; note also that it has the following subtitle: “Enlightenment as Mass Deception”. The very title of this chapter is already a crude response to Walter Benjamin’s idea that the age of mechanical reproduction would promise a new form of liberation or enlightenment.
If one thinks of this in connection with Walter Benjamin’s theses, one can see that it is not only the notions associated with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment that Adorno and Horkheimer were criticizing, but the views of those authors, such as Benjamin and Brecht, according to whom new forms of mechanical reproduction would lead to a new enlightenment in the twentieth century. Similarly, the other chapter entitled “Elements of Anti-Semitism” also develops in opposition to Lukács, Benjamin and Bloch.
To do so, they also analyze fascism in countries other than Germany. Think of it as the 1940s, when the war was still going on! Think of it as the existence of fascist potential in America! This was another reason why Adorno and Horkheimer’s work created such a stir. As with the other writers we are discussing, the question of cultural experience in late capitalism is, for Horkheimer and Adorno, inseparable from their analysis of fascism.
Now, it will be seen that these two chapters mentioned have been so misunderstood because they are part of a larger analysis; their understanding depends on the work they were doing elsewhere. I will therefore discuss these two chapters in connection with other sources. One cannot rely on the Dialectics of Enlightenment. I will try to show how the central ideas of this work se fit in with the other works they were developing at the same time.
The theory of anti-Semitism, which I will discuss first, is inseparable from the work that Adorno had done in The Authoritarian Personality; in this book, he and three other authors had the audacity to analyze the fascist potential in America in the 1940s. This book, by the way, is well known as a piece of empirical sociology in which they seek to measure the antidemocratic potential of individuals – of American individuals in this case – through the discovery of a specified disposition, using a scale.
The main criticism of the book stated that the notion of fascist or authoritarian personality is presupposed, that it is not demonstrated by empirical tests. The research done fails to explain authoritarianism at the macro level, because it is based on the identification of a psychological syndrome. Adorno responded to these criticisms in the aforementioned chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment. There, in “Elements of Anti-Semitism”, he points out precisely what this theoretical background would be.
This chapter of the Dialectic of Enlightenment revolves around the proposition that “bourgeois anti-Semitism has a specific economic reason: the concealment of domination in production.” I will try to explain how this was articulated there.
The capitalist is judged by the worker as someone who is engaged in productive labor, but, as Marx argued, profit, the return to capital, cannot rightly be regarded as a return to productive labor. Marx considered that only the worker is productive of value—that is, he is the one who actually produces new values under capitalism. Jews were long excluded from ownership of the means of production, but were allowed to own much of the circulating sector.
This intermediary role in the sphere of commerce and consumption is better understood by the worker than the role of the capitalist in production, but less intelligible to him as an essential function of capitalism. It is easier for the worker to understand the immediate function of the capitalist in the production of goods, but less easy to understand the intermediary function of commerce: advertising, financial techniques, etc.
It is easier to understand the relationship between wages and prices—that is, what one can buy with one's wages—than it is to understand the relationship between the workers' own productive labor and the wages they receive for it. Horkheimer and Adorno argued that the economic injustice produced by the entire capitalist class is then attributed solely to the Jews.
They are regarded by the masses as unproductive parasites: 'The merchant [i.e., the Jew] presents them [the workers] with the bill they have signed to the manufacturer. The merchant becomes the bailiff of the entire system and takes upon himself the hatred due to others. The responsibility of the circulation sector is a socially necessary illusion [or ideology].
In late capitalist society, the growth of large organizations diminishes the role of the intermediary, the sphere of circulation, since production and distribution come to be dominated and controlled by strong centralized agencies. Thus, there was no longer any economic need for the Jews, but there was certainly a need to attribute to them the crises of the entire system, such as those of the interwar period, reviving the image of the unproductive parasite.
When reading this chapter in Dialectic of Enlightenment, One might ask where all this came from. Well, I have tried to bring to light in the most rigorous way possible the theory that underlies it.
The remainder of this chapter in Dialectic of Enlightenment develops a psychoanalytic theory of anti-Semitism as a projection of the dynamics of the mode of domination; here the new forms of impotence thus generated are projected onto the Jews. It is worth remembering here that Marx had revealed that religion itself is a projection of social impotence.
Projection is not only a projection in Marx’s sense of what is denied – power – but it is also a projection of what is desired and feared. Projection is not only about who exercises control over the exploited, but also about the needs and fears aroused by the exploiters. Projection theory is based on a general theory of the loss of autonomy of the individual. Fascism is understood as an extreme case of such a loss of autonomy, which Adorno explained through the model of narcissistic identification.
Fascist propaganda mobilized “unconscious and regressive processes” in a specific way that did not represent “the return of the archaic, but its reproduction in and by civilization itself” in a planned and calculated manner.[I]
What I have tried to do in explaining this theory of anti-Semitism is to counter the charge that Horkheimer and Adorno reduced fascism to a mere psychological explanation. I have tried to show that they attempted to give a structural explanation of anti-Semitism; that, moreover, they only secondarily passed, after having analyzed the economic basis of anti-Semitism, to using psychoanalytic concepts.
*Gillian Rose (1947–1995) was a British philosopher and sociologist. Author, among other books, of The melancholy science: an introduction to the thought of Theodor Adorno (To). [https://amzn.to/4dBfa8t]
Translation: Eleutério FS Prado.
Reference
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. The dialectic of enlightenment. Zahar, 224 pages. [https://amzn.to/3B8hNjQ]
Translator's note
[I] This deserves an interpretation based on the critique of the subject that is implicit in The capital: the subject affirmed in circulation but denied in production becomes – and cannot but be in general – an extremely resentful social individual; as this resentment lives and boils in his unconscious, it can be mobilized by fascist propaganda and staging for purposes that remain hidden, but imply the preservation of capitalism, no longer reflected as liberal, but now presented as illiberal or fascist.
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