The dialectic of enlightenment

Horkheimer and Adorno's book Dialectic of Enlightenment was written in the concluding months of the Second World War. It is comparable with contemporaneous works by other exiled German speaking philosophers, notably Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies and Lukács's The Destruction of Reason, in being what Popper himself described as his "contribution to the war effort." Comparisons are instructive.