The Dialectic of Enlightenment revisited

This reflection critically interrogates Adorno and Horkheimer’s 1944 much-admired Dialectic of Enlightenment, addressing its contextual and ideological origins, its philosophical biases and theoretical assumptions, and the nature of its emphases and omissions as the work sought to grasp the barbarism of the time. It also highlights a rather overlooked publication detail which ideally should have given the authors pause to somewhat revise their provocative views and positions, but in practice did not.