Max Horkheimer (1895–1973)

Part.1 The concept of enlightenment

Enlightenment takes no account of itself at all; it erases all traces of its self-consciousness.

Die Hitler Jugend, the swagger of the rabble, did not regress to barbarism, but was a triumph of mandatory equality, which developed just equality into equal injustice.

The individual is reduced to a collection of habitual reflections and actually desired ways of behaving. Animism spiritualizes the object, whereas industrialization objectifies the human soul.

In the earliest known stages of mankind, there was an obscure religious code called Mana, which existed in the splendid Greek religious world. All that is unfamiliar and unknown is original, undifferentiated, and beyond the sphere of experience; Everything has more implications than we have previously known. In this sense, what the primitive people experienced was not a spiritual entity corresponding to the physical entity, but a die Nature corresponding to the individual.

Throughout the centuries of Christian history, love for one's neighbour has always covered up a latent hatred of the woman, which is now forbidden by coercive means - the woman is only the object used to reclaim that futile fact. This hatred compensates for the worship of the Virgin through the persecution of witches, a form of revenge that survives in the memory of pre-Christian prophetess, a vestige of a latent suspicion of a deified patriarchal ruling order.

Part.2 The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception

Under monopoly, all mass culture is consistent, and the framework it produces through the way it thinks begins to manifest itself clearly. Those at the top no longer consciously shy away from monopoly: violence has become more public and power has ballooned. Movies and radio no longer have to pretend to be art; they have become fair trade, truth transformed into ideology in order to judge the rubbish they produce. They call themselves industries.

However, the paradise of the culture industry is also a kind of drudgery. Escapes and elopements are pre-programmed to come back in the end. Pleasure is supposed to help people forget to submit, but instead it makes people more submissive.

The desperate search for consistency is bound to lead to failure. In order to avoid this failure, all great works of art stylistically achieve a self-denial, while bad ones often rely on similarity to other works, on a coherence with an alternative character.… (more)

This book, published in 1947, seems dated. It loudly laments the loss of a universally accepted "objective reason" that has been replaced by rationalization (aka, "subjective reason"). To Horkheimer, a world of firmly-held standards has yielded to one of relative moral chaos.

The author's warning cry seems exaggerated. There probably never was an objective reason. The task has always been to judge the sincerity and integrity behind anyone's views. There have always been liars and bullshitters to look out for. On the other hand, the rise of corporate power and its attendant sleezy culture over the past century has doubtless occasioned an overall decline in integrity and a concomitant increase in rationalization, or worse. The Trump phenomenon of the past six years hasn't helped.

The good news: we can probably expect that the battle to establish standards of reason that rise above self-interest will continue, and hope that, if we join the fight, truth may ultimately prevail.… (more)