Dialectic

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ultural Memory
in
the
resent
Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Editors

D IALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
Philosophical Fragments

MAX HORKHEIMER and
THEODOR W. ADORNO

Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr
Translated by Edmund Jephcott

  
, 


Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments is translated fromVolume 5
of Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften: Dialektik der Aufklärung und
Schriften 1940–1950, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, ©1987 by S. Fishcher
Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main.
Asterisks in the text and display material mark editorial notes created for the
German edition. They include variant readings and other textual concerns.
They are keyed in the reference matter section viathe number of the page on
which the asterisk appears and the preceding word. Numbered notes are those
created by Horkheimer and Adorno themselves.
English translation ©2002 by the Board of Trustees
of the Leland Stanford Junior University
Horkheimer, Max, 1895–1973
[Philosophische Fragmente. English]
Dialectic of enlightenment : philosophical fragments / Max Horkheimer and
Theodor W. Adorno; edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr ; translated by
Edmund Jephcott.
p. cm. — (Cultural memory in the present)
Includes bibliographical references.
isbn 0-8047-3632-4 (alk. paper) — isbn 0-8047-3633-2 (pbk: alk. paper)
1. Philosophy. I. Adorno, Theodor W., 1903–1969. II. Schmid Noerr,
Gunzelin. III. Title. IV. Series.
b3279.h8473 p513 2002
193—dc21
2002000073
Printed in the United Statesof America
Original Printing 2002
Last figure below indicates year of this printing:
11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02
Typeset at Stanford University Press in 11/13.5 Adobe Garamond

For Friedrich Pollock*

Contents

Preface to the New Edition (1969)

xi

Preface to the Italian Edition (1962/1966)

xiii

Preface (1944 and 1947)

xiv

The Concept of Enlightenment

1Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment

35

Excursus II: Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality

63

The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception

94

Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment

137

Notes and Sketches

173

Editor’s Afterword

217

The Disappearance of Class History in “Dialectic of
Enlightenment”: A Commentary on the Textual Variants(1944 and 1947), by Willem van Reijen and Jan Bransen

248

Notes

253

Preface to the New Edition (1969)

Dialectic of Enlightenment was published in 1947 by Querido in
Amsterdam. The book, which found readers only gradually, has been out
of print for some time. We have been induced to reissue it after more than
twenty years not only by requests from many sides but by the notionthat
not a few of the ideas in it are timely now and have largely determined our
later theoretical writings. No one who was not involved in the writing
could easily understand to what extent we both feel responsible for every
sentence. We dictated long stretches together; the Dialectic derives its vital
energy from the tension between the two intellectual temperaments which
came together inwriting it.
We do not stand by everything we said in the book in its original
form. That would be incompatible with a theory which attributes a temporal core to truth instead of contrasting truth as something invariable to
the movement of history. The book was written at a time when the end of
the National Socialist terror was in sight. In not a few places, however, the
formulation is no longeradequate to the reality of today. All the same,
even at that time we did not underestimate the implications of the transition to the administered world.
In a period of political division into immense blocs driven by an
objective tendency to collide, horror has been prolonged. The conflicts in
the third world and the renewed growth of totalitarianism are not mere
historical interludes any...