Bernstein interprets Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment as a radical reworking of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. He says:

I think that it is both helpful and accurate to see the conceptual figures of pure insight and faith suspicion and trust, desired independence and disavowed dependence, mastery and slavery as structuring the dialectic of enlightenment.

So we understand the dialectic of enlightenment as taken over from Hegel as the dialectic of desired independence from nature in which an enlightening reason seeks, through knowing and labour, to master nature and become independent of it, without acknowledging its pervasive dependence. What drives the dialectic is fear of nature and the liberation of human beings from fear through reason as a strategy for self-preservation turns them into masters.