Dialectic of enlightenment : philosophical fragments

Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. What we had set out to do, the authors write in the Preface, nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism. Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of contemporary events. Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle against natural forces, as represented in myths, are connected in a wide arch to the most threatening…