ABSTRACT
Socialism had been defeated in Germany immediately during and after that nation’s capitulation to the Allies in 1918, and Bolshevism had trimphed only a short time before 1912 in the new Soviet Union. Many of the members of the Frankfurt School wound up in American exile during the 1930s and 1940s. The ethical poverty of Enlightenment, conceived of as exclusively analytical reason, is the common denominator by which Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno group together such apparently diverse writers as Kant, de Sade, and Nietzsche, none of whom, the authors argue, were able to satisfactorily justify resistance to domination in terms of reason alone. Acknowledged as a criticism of limited historical extension by its authors, much of the essence of what Horkheimer and Adorno concluded concerning the relationship of Enlightenment to domination nevertheless set the tone for later postmodern treatments of culture, media, and power.
