| ||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £2.85
Trade in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Verso Classics) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £2.85, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Authors
Discover books, learn about writers, and more.
Product Description
Product Description
Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. What we had set out to do, the authors write in the Preface, was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism. Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of contemporary events. Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle against natural forces, as represented in myths, are connected in a wide arch to the most threatening experiences of the present. The book consists in five chapters, at first glance unconnected, together with a number of shorter notes. The various analyses concern such phenomena as the detachment of science from practical life, formalised morality, the manipulative nature of entertainment culture, and a paranoid behavioral structure, expressed in aggressive anti-Semitism, that marks the limits of enlightenment. The authors perceive a common element in these phenomena, the tendency toward self-destruction of the guiding criteria inherent in enlightenment thought from the beginning. Using historical analyses to elucidate the present, they show, against the background of a prehistory of subjectivity, why the National Socialist terror was not an aberration of modern history but was rooted deeply in the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization. Adorno and Horkheimer see the self-destruction of Western reason as grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the domination of external nature and society. They trace enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, back to its mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth, therefore, are not irreconcilable opposites, but dialectically mediated qualities of both real and intellectual life. "Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology." This paradox is the fundamental thesis of the book. This new translation, based on the text in the complete edition of the works of Max Horkheimer, contains textual variants, commentary upon them, and an editorial discussion of the position of this work in the development of Critical Theory.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
About the Author
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno were two influential members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
60 of 74 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Challenging and enlightening, if difficult at first.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Dialectic of Enlightenment (Verso Classics) (Paperback)
Horkheimer and Adorno's post-war exposition of the dark underbelly of modernity retains a fantastic relevance to this day. While the enlightenment project has suffered a recent battering it is still the fundamental determinate of Western post-industrial society. Reason, rationality, the rule of science over nature are still conceptual benchmarks for our modalities of thought. The dialectic of enlightenment serves as a constant reminder of the potential that we all have to give in to nature, to our passions and our senses. Lurking beneath the veneer of 'civilisation' and 'progress' lie more sinister corrolaries which act in dialectical congruence thereby perpetuating the risk of eventualities such as the holocaust. The book does require a patient reading, but if you give the idiosyncratic style a little time it shouldn't prove too impervious.James Bell
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Genuine Classic,
By
This review is from: Dialectic of Enlightenment (Verso Classics) (Paperback)
In my humble opinion this work is quite simply the high water mark of Western thinking. There has never been an adequate response by any writer. Post-Modernism means after Modernism, this book destroys the whole concept of the Modern, before the Post-Modernists were even around....
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.3 out of 5 stars (18 customer reviews) 106 of 113 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Culture as a new barbarism,
By TheIrrationalMan - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Dialectic of Enlightenment (Paperback)
"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.
72 of 78 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This Amazon Page is a Disaster!!,
By J. C. Evans - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Dialectic of Enlightenment (Cultural Memory in the Present) (Paperback)
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. 77 of 86 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A Warning about the translation,
By A Customer - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Dialectic of Enlightenment (Paperback)
These comments refer to the old Continuum edition, NOT to the Stanford edition, 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. |
|
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
