ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the middle period of Critical Theory, its theoretical confrontation with fascism and its various attempts to explain its rise and its nature. It begins with an examination of Max Horkheimer's account, in socioeconomic terms, of the rise of Nazism in Germany; and turns to the idea of the "dialectic of enlightenment" and Horkheimer's critique of modern science and its philosophy. The chapter provides a brief summary of The Authoritarian Personality. By 1939, it was clear to Horkheimer that the possibility of changing capitalist society to a socialist one had been unmasked as an illusion. The heirs of the free enterprise system could maintain their domination only by the abolition of the freedom of bourgeois-liberal democracy. In Germany, Fascism won the day with a crassly xenophobic, collectivistic ideology which was hostile to culture.
