ABSTRACT
Though the personal relationship between Arendt and Adorno is a fascinating topic, the chapter explores the differences between their understanding and evaluation of the crisis of western modernity as embodied in the Holocaust. Indeed, what their different approaches and disparate conclusions reflect was the difficulty in those early postwar years of figuring out why or how ‘it’ had happened. However, the ‘fact’ is that most forms of western Marxism stubbornly refused to take phenomena such as racial, ethnic or national consciousness seriously in theoretical terms or to pay them much attention in the inter-war years. The connection Arendt made between ideological racism and the end of western humanism raises many issues, not least among them the relationship between Arendt’s thesis about this ‘break’ in the tradition and the Adorno-Horkheimer ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’ thesis.
