Dialectic of Enlightenment (German: Dialektik der Aufklärung) is a work of philosophy and social criticism written by Frankfurt School philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.

[3] Together with Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality (1950) and fellow Frankfurt School member Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (1964), it has had a major effect on 20th-century philosophy, sociology, culture, and politics, especially inspiring the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s.

"[5]: xi  One of the distinguishing characteristics of the new critical theory, as Adorno and Horkheimer set out to elaborate it in Dialectic of Enlightenment, is a certain ambivalence concerning the ultimate source or foundation of social domination.

Instead the conscious decision of the managing directors executes as results (which are more obligatory than the blindest price-mechanisms) the old law of value and hence the destiny of capitalism.Because of this, contrary to Marx's famous prediction in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, this shift did not lead to "an era of social revolution," but rather to fascism and totalitarianism.

"[5]: xviii The history of human societies, as well as that of the formation of individual ego or self, is re-evaluated from the standpoint of what Horkheimer and Adorno perceived at the time as the ultimate outcome of this history: the collapse or "regression" of reason, with the rise of National Socialism, into something (referred to as merely "enlightenment" for the majority of the text) resembling the very forms of superstition and myth out of which reason had supposedly emerged as a result of historical progress or development.

[12] To characterize this history, Horkheimer and Adorno draw on a wide variety of material, including the philosophical anthropology contained in Marx's early writings, centered on the notion of "labor;" Nietzsche's genealogy of morality, and the emergence of conscience through the renunciation of the will to power; Freud's account in Totem and Taboo of the emergence of civilization and law in murder of the primordial father;[13] and ethnological research on magic and rituals in primitive societies;[14] as well as myth criticism, philology, and literary analysis.

[15] Adorno and Horkheimer argue that antisemitism is a deeply rooted, irrational phenomenon that stems from the failure of the Enlightenment project and the inherent contradictions of bourgeois society.

Ultimately, Adorno and Horkheimer see the persecution of the Jews as a symptom of the unresolved contradictions and pathologies of modern society, which can only be addressed through a radical critique of the Enlightenment project and the social conditions that sustain it.

"[18] By associating the Enlightenment and Totalitarianism with Marquis de Sade's works—especially Juliette, in excursus II—the text also contributes to the pathologization of sadomasochist desires, as discussed by historian of sexuality Alison Moore.

The truth that they are nothing but business is used as an ideology to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce....The standardized forms, it is claimed, were originally derived from the needs of the consumers: that is why they are accepted with so little resistance.