ABSTRACT
The critique of the Enlightenment by means of the dialectic seemed to many educated people, particularly the socialists of the generation before ours, one of the decisive achievements of western intellectual history. After the decline of neo-Kantianism, which was largely a reversion to the individualist mental categories of the Enlightenment, there seemed to be scarcely a serious rationalist left in Europe. Those that remained were either, like Ernst Cassirer, the last remnants of a bygone period of philosophy, or isolated figures with no claim to any influence on the structure of European intellectual life.
