Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor W. Adorno

Adorno’s views are worth examining not only because of their scope, blending social theory, metaphysics, and aesthetics with a historical critique of late capitalism, but because of their peculiar philosophical sensibility. Thus, the ideas of the first-generation thinkers from the Frankfurt School remain unfamiliar to IR students.

While Habermas clearly represents the School’s critical theoretical orientation, his formal connection with the Institute of Social Research had remained tenuous after Horkheimer rejected Habermas’s habilitation project, later published as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989 ). Students of International Relations (IR) usually get acquainted with critical theory via the writings of Jürgen Habermas, a second-generation scholar from the Frankfurt School. In the course of analysis, it will attempt to address the following questions: Why should we read Adorno today? How do his ideas illuminate late modern society? Do they broaden our understanding of current global society? This article will outline Adorno’s contribution to critical theory by paying attention to the problem of late modernity. After Adorno joined Horkheimer as a co-director, the two wrote a series of interventions the best known among which is Dialectic of Enlightenment (1997 ), a work produced in exile in America where the Institute for Social Research was temporarily relocated to avoid Nazi persecution. Under the directorship of Horkheimer, from 1931 onwards, research at the Institute took a decisively philosophical outlook and enlisted figures such as Friedrich Pollock, Leo Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm (Wiggershaus 1995, 24-105). Not all members of the Institute were Marxists however, and its orientation was interdisciplinary, bringing together social theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, economics and empirical studies. The School’s institutional basis, the Institute of Social Research, was set up in 1923 in Frankfurt am Main by the son of an affluent grain merchant, Felix Weil, with the purpose of studying the contradictions of contemporary society from a Marxist standpoint. The programmatic for the School distinction between ‘traditional theory’ and ‘critical theory’ was coined by Adorno’s close associate and co-author, Max Horkheimer (1972). Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno is one of the most enigmatic members of the Frankfurt School associated with the movement of critical theory.

Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor W. Adorno