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July 14, 2005
In his chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Adorno, entitled 'Negative Dialectic As Fate' J.M. Bernstein gives us a good interpretation of the core thesis of Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment.
He states:
Dialectic of Enlightenment is the attempt to provide a conceptual analysis of how it is possible that the rational process of enlightenment which was intended to secure freedom from fear and human sovereignty could turn into forms of political, social and ultural dominaton in which humans are deprived of their individuality and society is generally emptied of human meaning.
Bernstein says that Horkheimer and Adorno's offical answer is that instrumental reason, that part of reason whose job it is to enable our coping with, and mastery of threatening nature, is taken to be the whole of reason, then we end up in the apparently ever-moving, but, in reality, static iron cage of modernity.
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