Dialectic of Enlightenment

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's central work of critical theory, written in wartime Los Angeles exile and first circulated in 1944 before its 1947 published edition. It argues that the Enlightenment project of mastering nature through reason carries the seed of its own reversal, producing new forms of domination, standardized mass culture and, in fascism, an outright regression into myth, so that Enlightenment rationality and the barbarism it set out to escape are dialectically bound together rather than simple opposites.