Notes on Dialectic of Enlightenment, ch. 1

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, published 1947) is an account of the endogenous failures of modernity as rooted in the core presuppositions of enlightenment rationality. “Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to myth.” Not a romantic call for a return to myth then; rather an attempt to diagnose the pathologies of the whole complex arising from this abstract opposition and a dialectical progression rooted in fear and a correlative desire for mastery.

In fact what would need to change is the structure of society itself. This is a philosophical analysis of a series of problems that philosophy cannot solve. It calls for the abolition of the principle of exchange and the division of labor predicated on class antagonism.