Peter Murphy and David Roberts' Dialectic of Romanticism both refer to Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, and challenge stheir vision of the trajectory of the West from Greek beginnings to totalitarian conclusions and what they see as a one-dimensional equation of enlightenment and myth. In contrast, they argue that romanticism and enlightenment have proved fatal genies in modernity during the Long 19th Century from the French Revolution to the Nazis.

In this review of Dialectic of Romanticism in Continuum Robert Savage says:

The dialectics of enlightenment and romanticism were both triggered by the historicist self-understanding of modernity, with its chronic awareness of man's pre- or deformation through cultural factors over which he has no immediate control. Together, enlightenment and romanticism make up the divided unity of [European] modernism (a modernism which, in this account, extends to its various postmodern recensions). Whereas enlightenment rationalism has as its goal the liberation of man from the contingencies of birth and custom, romanticism responds by calling for a return to nature. Regardless of how such a return may be construed in individual cases as the descent to the chthonian realm of the Earth Mother (Bachofen, Baeumler), as the remembrance of nature in the subject (Horkheimer/ Adorno), as the repetitive recuperation of the original event of Being (Heidegger) the split between nature and spirit is in each case to be overcome through their reunion in a “new mythology founded upon the free interplay of the rational and creative faculties.

They say:

Enlightenment autonomy is always threatened by the immanent contradiction of denaturalization: the reversal of freedom into unfreedom (the perpetuation of the blindness of nature); romantic incarnation is always threatened by the immanent contradiction of renaturalization: the reversal of the spiritualization of nature into the naturalization of spirit, of creative into destructive nature. Each bears witness to the failed internal dialogue of modernity

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