Against Disenchantment

Enlightenment's programme was the disenchantment of the world… The disenchantment of the world means the extirpation of animism… the Enlightenment detected a fear of the demons through whose effigies human beings had tried to influence nature in magic rituals.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)
The past few years have seen a resurgence of interest in the Frankfurt School – a group of German sociologists, philosophers, cultural theorists, psychoanalysts and their students – whose work is now synonymous with critical theory. Most of the initial members of the Frankfurt School came together in the 1920s at the Institute for Social Research in the German city of Frankfurt. Because most of the early members were Jews, many either perished or fled Germany when the Nazis came to power. The cross-fertilisation of critical social science with philosophy was particularly fertile ground. Today, their studies of ‘the Authoritarian Personality' and Right-wing populism, and their denunciations of the ‘poverty' of consumer culture, have come to look downright prescient.  

Two of the Frankfurt School's most important members were the philosophers Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) and Theodor Adorno (1903-69). They initially met in 1921 in a seminar on gestalt psychology at the Goethe University in Frankfurt where Adorno was an undergraduate and Horkheimer a PhD student. But their intellectual relationship really blossomed under their shared experiences as German émigrés in the United States during the Second World War years, leading to some of the sustained critiques of late-capitalist society that have made the Frankfurt School famous. As Alex Ross recently put it in The New Yorker: ‘If Adorno were to look upon the cultural landscape of the 21st century, he might take grim satisfaction in seeing his fondest fears realised.'

The single most important work produced by the Frankfurt School was the book that Horkheimer and Adorno co-authored, the monumental Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, revised 1947), an attempt to diagnose the maladies of modernity by understanding how modernity could have produced the horrors of fascism and Stalinism alike.