ABSTRACT
Existentialism was clearly the main competitor of the Frankfurt School as regards the critique of reification, and was far more influential as a philosophy. German thinkers rarely used the term, but on the face of it the intention of their anthropological theories was the same: to express in philosophical language the contrast between the self-determining consciousness of the individual and the anonymous world of social ties conforming to rules of their own. The Dialectic of Enlightenment contains all the elements of Marcuse’s later attack on modern philosophy, which allegedly favors totalitarianism by maintaining a positivist “neutralism” in regard to the world of values and by insisting that human knowledge should be controlled by facts. This strange paralogism, equating the observance of empirical and logical rules with fidelity to the status quo and rejection of all change, recurs again and again in the writings of the Frankfurt School.
