The New Failure of Nerve, the Eclipse of Reason, and the Critique

of Enlightenment in New York and Los Angeles, 1940-1947*

James Schmidt, Boston University

n a letter to Max Horkheimer dated November 10, 1941, Theodor Adorno

summarized the arrangements for the journey that would take him from New York to
Los Angeles where he would join Horkheimer in the long-anticipated and muchdelayed collaboration that, three years later, would result in the first edition of Dialectic
of Enlightenment. He would depart by train for Cleveland on Saturday, November 15
and spend the night there before proceeding on to Chicago, where, on Sunday evening, he
would set out for the wild west, arriving at Los Angeles Union Station on Wednesday
morning. Though struggling with fever and the grippe, he was pleased both at the
prospect of commencing work with Horkheimer and by the fact that Herbert Marcuse
who had spent time working with Horkheimer in California while Adorno been burdened
with administrative chores in New York had now been eased out of the project.
Offering a quick survey of the work he had been finishing up in New York, he reported
that he had received the draft of the translation of his forthcoming article on Thorsten
Veblen and that he been able to track down a copy of Geoffrey Gorers book on the
Marquis de Sade, a work, he informed Horkheimer, that might prove useful to them: it
deals essentially with the dialectic of enlightenment or the dialectic of culture and
barbarism. 1
The penultimate paragraph of the letter contains a passing mention of an
unusually encouraging lunch with MacDonald [sic] and one of his colleagues, at which
it became clear that his circle is so taken with our things that they would publish every
sentence. Concluding that it would have been too unsympathetic to put these people,
who really had something to do with us off with the usual excuses that associates of the
Institute for Social Research offered in order to maintain the low profile that the evercautious Horkheimer maintained for most of the Institutes American exile, he confessed
to Horkheimer that he had been moved to explain to them as sincerely as possible that
collaboration with us is impossible. 2
This cryptic summary is the sole surviving account of what may be one of the
more intriguing missed connections during the Institute for Social Researchs exile in
America. For the figure designated in Adornos letter to Horkheimer as MacDonald
was, in fact, Dwight Macdonald, the American cultural critic who, at this point, was one
of the editors of Partisan Review.3 Macdonalds expression of enthusiasm for the work in
which Horkheimer and his colleagues were engaged came at the moment when he was
locked in a struggle with his co-editors Philip Rahv and William Phillips over the
direction of the journal, a struggle that would climax with Macdonalds resignation from
the journal after a heated series of exchanges published in the journal over the course of
1943 under the collective title The New Failure of Nerve.
Horkheimer followed this dispute with considerable interest and in September
1943 while revising the draft that Adorno had presented him of the Dialectic of
Enlightenments famous chapter on the culture industry he sketched a response to the
articles by Sidney Hook, John Dewey, and Ernst Nagel, that had launched the exchanges
*Prepared for the International Workshop: The Enlightenment between Europe and the United States,
Center for Advanced Studies, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitt, Munich, Germany, May 27-28, 2011.
2011 James Schmidt

2
in Partisan Review. For the rest of the year he worked fitfully on his Hook
article before finally setting it aside sometime before July 1944, in the midst of an
increasingly troubled relationship with the young sociologist Benjamin Nelson, who had
been contracted to work on its translation into English. The abandoned draft was taken up
again in the course of the editing process that transformed the series of lectures
Horkheimer had given at Columbia University early in 1944 under the collective title
Society and Reason into Eclipse of Reason, his 1947 attempt to provide a summary of
the argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment for an Anglophone audience and was used as
the basis for the books second chapter.
Horkheimers interest in the debate that unfolded in Partisan Review offers an
unusual perspective on the ways in which the legacy of the Enlightenment was being
disputed in America during the 1940s. It is, in large part, the story of exchanges between
individuals who would seem to have much to say to one another, but who because of
the distances (both geographical and cultural) that separated them and the
misunderstandings that divided them were never quite able to make sense of each
other. In what follows, I hope to trace some of those disagreements, mark some of the
misunderstandings, and assess their impact.
I. Liberalism, Nihilism, and National Socialism
One of the provocations for the articles on the New Failure of Nerve was an
address delivered by the American philosopher Mortimer Adler at a conference
sponsored in September 1940 by the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in
their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, Inc. The event had energetically
promoted an article in the New York Times announced that seventy-nine of the
countrys leading scientists, philosophers and theologians, including Albert Einstein and
Enrico Fermi, had signed on to the Conferences spiritual call to arms and its aim
was to rally our intellectual and spiritual forces in the face of the threat of fascist
totalitarianism. The press release outlining the plans for the symposium stressed the
pluralistic character of the undertaking, noting that the conveners had no intention of
depriving either philosophy or science of their genuine autonomy nor of suggesting that
it is possible or desirable that Western religions be reduced to a common denominator.
Nevertheless, they expressed the conviction that our common background gives us a
broad basis for a united, democratic American way of life. Fundamental to that way of
life was the religious principle of the Fatherhood of God and the worth and dignity of
Man when regarded as a child of God. 4
Whatever hopes those involved in the undertaking might have had for a collegial
exploration of these common commitments was almost immediately shaken by Adlers
caustic talk, which charged that the greatest danger to the democratic way of life came
not from foreign enemies but from forces closer to home.
I say that the most serious threat to Democracy is the positivism of
the professors, which dominates every aspect of modern education
and is the central corruption of modern culture. Democracy has
much more to fear from the mentality of its teachers than from the
nihilism of Hitler. It is the same nihilism in both cases, but Hitlers

3
is more honest and consistent, less blurred by subtleties and queasy
clarifications, and hence less dangerous. 5
The problem, as Adler saw it, was that the professors were, at bottom, hypocrites: they
argued for religious toleration and gave lip-service to the idea that religious belief plays
an important role in modern society, but they refused to recognize that religion rests on
supernatural knowledge or to acknowledge that it is superior to both philosophy and
science. That refusal, Adler insisted, paved the way for catastrophe: The mere
toleration of religion, which implies indifference to or denial of its claims, produces a
secularized culture as much as militant atheism or Nazi nihilism. Indeed, by the end of
his lecture, Adler appeared to suggest that Nazi nihilism was, if anything, preferable to
the academic variety: it was possible to view Hitler as part of the Divine plan to bless
mans temporal civilization with the goodness of Democracy by preparing the agony
through which our culture will be reborn.6 Academics, on the other hand, were so
thoroughly complicit in the crisis that engulfed modern culture that until the professors
and their culture are liquidated, the resolution of modern problems will not even
begin.7 Scrambling biblical images, Adler closed by proclaiming, The tower of Babel
we are building invites another flood at which point an awning, overburdened by the
mornings rain, gave way, drenching part of the audience.8
Adlers rhetoric was extreme, but the connection he drew between National
Socialism and a more pervasive cultural nihilism was hardly unique. The address to the
symposium by Adlers friend Jacques Maritain had made much the same point, albeit in
considerably more temperate language. Maritain saw the chief threat to modern
democracies as stemming from the false ideology that held that a democratic society
must be a non-hierarchal whole. Against this view, he insisted that democracy
ultimately rested on an organic hierarchy of liberties and that the knowledge of the
proper ordering of these liberties required the sort of metaphysical and theological
knowledge that modern science and technology tends to erode.9 For this reason, an
education in which the sciences of phenomena and the corresponding techniques take
precedence over philosophical and theological knowledge is already, potentially, a
Fascist education since it could offer no foundations for morality other than biology,
hygiene and eugenics.10
Much the same diagnosis can be found in an article by the historian Carlton J. H.
Hayes that appeared in the same year. Every civilization, he insisted, builds upon a
particular religious profession and upon the popular mores emanating from it . As a
consequence of the gradual secularizing of religion and the universities, the atomizing
of society that resulted from liberalisms warfare on privileged corporations, and the
dislocations produced by the Industrial Revolution (which Hayes saw as sparking a
movement of masses across Europe in search of work that was almost Gypsy-like"), this
foundation had now been shattered. Hayes doubted that the religious void that had
opened could be filled by an appeal to humanity or to science such concepts are
too abstract and intellectual as well as a bit stale. Instead, the masses found a
surrogate in materialistic communism or in nationalistic deification of blood and soil.
The attraction that totalitarian dictators were able to exercise over their followers, he
argued, lay in the essentially religious appeal they make.11 Similar views could be

4
found in a 1942 article by the political theorist John Hallowell, who charged that
the growing prestige of science and the infiltration of positivism into all realms of
thought had so eroded the moral presuppositions on which liberalism rested that even
those prominent German intellectuals who, prior to 1933, had professed to be liberals
were able to accept, and even in many cases actively to acclaim the National Socialist
regime. Like the National Socialists, Hallowell concluded, they were nihilists. They
had neither the standards nor the will to declare this despotism wrong or evil.12
The association of National Socialism with nihilism owed much of its currency to
Hermann Rauschnings The Revolution of Nihilism, first published in German in 1938
and available in English within a year. The book whose notoriety rested in large part
on its being one of the earliest insider accounts of the Third Reich was intended as a
warning to those conservatives who (like Rauschning) had supported Hitler in the hope of
curbing what they regarded as the revolutionary excesses of the Weimar Republic.
Rauschning argued that the course pursued by the new regime had made it clear that the
hope that Nationalism Socialism could forge an alliance between middle-class
nationalism and monarchist conservatism had now been revealed as unsound. What
had come to power in 1933 was no longer a nationalist but a revolutionary movement
and the policies it put into practice aimed at nothing less than the abolition of the
existing elements of order. National Socialism was, in short, a movement that was
possessed incurably with the devil of nihilism. 13
During the 1941-1942 academic year, Rauschnings book was included in the
readings of a faculty seminar conducted by the group of migrs who had come to New
York to join the University in Exile at the New School for Social Research.14 Among the
topics explored was the rise of illiberal and anti-Enlightenment ideas in Germany,
concerns that occupied a central place in the lecture on German Nihilism delivered in
February 1942 by the recently arrived migr political philosopher Leo Strauss.15 While
Rauschning had focused on the ways in which the National Socialist project could be
characterized as nihilistic, Strauss concerned himself with the intellectual milieu that,
in his view, had given rise to National Socialism. Tracing how a set of ideas that were
not nihilistic in itself, and perhaps even not entirely unsound led however to
nihilism in post-war Germany owing to a number of circumstances, he organized much
of his account around a reconstruction of the response of a few very intelligent and very
decent, if very young, Germans who, disgusted by the communist-anarchist-pacifist
future that they saw as the dominant utopia of the Weimar Republic and influenced by a
group of teachers (including Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jnger, and Martin
Heidegger) who knowingly or ignorantly paved the way for Hitler, were moved to
reject the ideas of modern civilization.16
Where Rauschning saw the goal of Hitlers revolution as the utter destruction of
all traditional spiritual standards, utter nihilism, Strauss was reluctant to characterize
these very intelligent and very decent supporters of Hitler as nihilists. They were, he
noted, not opposed to all civilized values, only to those associated with modern
civilization. They were, in a sense, the heirs of Rousseaus passionate protest against
the easy-going and somewhat rotten civilisation of the century of taste and of Nietzsche
subsequent protest against the easy-going and somewhat rotten civilisation of the
century of industry.17 Further, Strauss was unwilling to endorse Rauschnings call for a

5
defense of those traditional spiritual standards that National Socialism sought
to destroy. Western tradition, Strauss noted, is not so homogeneous as it may appear
as long as one is engaged in polemics or in apologetics. As a case in point, he observed
that the traditions represented by Voltaire and Cardinal Bellarmine were both opposed to
National Socialism, but the two could hardly be equated with one another. 18 Indeed,
Strauss seemed to be implying that attempts to resist National Socialism by appealing to
the part of the Western tradition represented by Voltaire were particularly futile.19 For
in the narrative he constructed it was the ultimate emptiness of this aspect of the Western
tradition that motivated his young Germans to mount the not entirely unsound critique
of the ideas of modern civilization that had set the stage for their embrace of National
Socialism.
Reprising what, by the end of the nineteenth century, had become the standard
account of the German relationship to the Enlightenment, Strauss insisted that The idea
of modern civilization is of English and French origin; it is not of German origin. In his
account, modern civilization boiled down to an attempt to lower the moral standards,
the moral claims, which had previously been made by all responsible teachers while, at
the same time, enforcing these now-diminished ideals more aggressively. Morality was
reduced to a defense of individual rights, a pursuit of enlightened self-interest, a
defense of honesty on the grounds that it is the best policy, and a hope that the conflict
between common interest and private industry could be solved economically. To its
lasting honour, German thought had opposed this debasement of morality, and the
concomitant decline of a truly philosophical spirit. But, in the end, the sole alternative
that it could offer was the only unambiguously unutilitarian value: courage. By the
end of the nineteenth century it was clear that the attempted German synthesis of the
modern ideal of material well-being and the pre-modern ideal of military virtue could
not hold: it was overrun by Western positivism, the natural child of the enlightenment.
As a result, Strausss very intelligent and very decent, if very young, Germans, found
themselves compelled to follow the path that had been blazed by Nietzsche. Cutting their
ties with the Anglo-French ideal of modern civilization, they held fast to the sole premodern ideal they could still salvage: martial virtue. It was this ideal that would find its
most vulgar exemplification in National Socialist militarism.20
Whatever the limitations of Strauss somewhat breathless account, it helps clarify
what was at stake in the broader argument that National Socialism was the heir not of
Romantic irrationalism (as had been argued by Peter Viereck, among others) but was
instead the bitter fruit of Enlightenment rationalism.21 In this narrative, the
Enlightenment appears as an irresistible force that undermines the established order,
corrodes all moral values, and produces a world in which the sole remaining standard is
that of instrumental efficacy. The work Horkheimer and Adorno were commencing in
California as Strauss was lecturing in New York is often seen as yet another contribution
to this line of argument. But things are not quite that simple.
II. Unpacking the Dialectic of Enlightenment in Los Angeles
Dialectic of Enlightenment opens with a sentence that, like much of what follows,
invites misunderstandings:

6
Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as progressive thought,
has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and
installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is
radiant with triumphant calamity.22
In a single gesture, Horkheimer and Adorno offer a sweeping definition of enlightenment
(a definition that should have but all too obviously hasnt been enough to dispel
any illusion that this was a book dealt with the particular period that we know as the
Enlightenment) and an equally sweeping summary of its consequences: a world
illuminated by triumphant calamity. It does not help matters that the passage is cast in
the form that Albert O. Hirschman once described as the single most popular and
effective weapon in the annals of reactionary rhetoric: the perversity thesis, which
argues that any attempt to improve society will invariably produce effects that are the
opposite of those intended. 23
What tends to be most memorable about Dialectic of Enlightenment are those
pithy formulations (most infamously, the three words: Enlightenment is totalitarian)
that would appear to confirm what readers are ready to assume: that the foundations of
the Nazi terror were laid by the Enlightenment.24 It is all too easy to miss the fact that
Horkheimer and Adorno never draw the conclusion to which the perversity thesis
typically leads: the admonition that, since efforts at enlightenment yield produce perverse
results, the project should be abandoned. In intent, if not always in execution, Dialectic of
Enlightenment pursues an argument of a rather different sort. As Adorno argued in
Minima Moralia, Not least among the tasks now confronting thought is that of placing
all the reactionary arguments against Western culture in the service of progressive
enlightenment.25 Such a strategy is not without its risks and, in their attempt to thwart
the perverse effects of an enlightenment gone awry, Horkheimer and Adorno produced a
book that yielded a perverse effect of its own: a legion of readers who assume that the
book constitutes a rejection of the Enlightenment project root and branch, rather than
an attempt to understand how enlightenment might be rescued from what it threatened to
become.
Part of the problem may be that the most concise explanations of the argument of
the book and, in particular, the summaries that Horkheimer tended to offer of his work
were also the least adequate. Consider, for example, the summary of the work in
which he had been engaged that Horkheimer offered in a 1939 letter to Adlers mentor
Robert Maynard Hutchins:
If one had to give a quick rough characterization of the complicated
process of the breakdown of culture in recent decades its ultimate
causes in every field will be found to go back to the Renaissance
one might say that passionate and unconditional interest in truth has
been replaced by an interest in success. To be sure, some
intellectuals do not openly maintain that there is no distinction to be
made between a good and a bad social order, that one is not obliged
to act justly, that God is a meaningless concept. Something much
worse has happened. These concepts and their appropriate
institutions still receive acknowledgment, but without concern for

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their concrete contents, without an orientation of science and life in
their direction.26
When married to Horkheimers tendency to frame his account in terms of a story of a
historical decline (i.e., from the Renaissance onwards, success trumps truth) the result is
an account that would appear to be arguing that the Enlightenment completes a process
that installs technical efficacy as the only surviving value. It either sets in motion (or,
alternatively, accelerates) a relentless process of critique that not only undermines
traditional values, but ultimately eliminates any other possible alternative standard of
evaluation. In short, the Enlightenment breeds nihilism.
But the summary that Horkheimer gave to Hutchins captures only a part of the
argument that he and Adorno would eventually articulate in the dense opening chapter of
Dialectic of Enlightenment. On the one hand, their point was that enlightenment falls
back into myth: all of the substantive principles that generations of enlighteners had
sought to oppose to mythology turn out to be no less mythical than the traditional
prejudices that they sought to dismantle. Yet, on the other hand, myth is already
enlightenment: it already represents an effort to understand nature, rather than simply
mimic it and, hence, already represents a contribution to the process of enlightenment.
The first of these theses would serve as the point of departure as Horkheimer and Adorno
began their work together. It would also remain a formulation to which Horkheimer
would return whenever he needed to offer a convenient prcis of his work with Adorno.27
The elaboration of the second theses would be the fruit of the intense collaboration that
began when Adorno arrived in California at the end of 1941.
During the winter of 1941-42 Horkheimer and Adorno wrestled with the task of
editing a hundred-page manuscript that Horkheimer had written, prior to Adornos
arrival, on the history of the concept of reason. Eventually published, in German,
under the title Vernunft und Selbsterhalung in a mimeographed memorial volume for
Walter Benjamin and, in English, as The End of Reason in the final volume of the
Institutes journal, the essay joined two of the concerns that had dominated Horkheimers
writings in the latter part of the 1930s the destruction of autonomous individuality and
the withering of the critical capacities of reason by arguing that both could be seen as
different sides of the same process. 28 As the fate of individuals increasingly fell under
the control of forces they could no longer comprehend, the struggle for self-preservation
increasingly took the form of an attempt to abandon the ego and somehow carry on
without it.29 In those authoritarian forms of rule that were everywhere on the rise,
rational argumentation loses its force. All that is now required of subjects is factual
knowledge, the automaton ability to react correctly.30
For Horkheimer this eradication of individuality mirrored developments in the
history of philosophy: following out its own principles, rationalism time and again
turns against itself and takes the form of skepticism.31 Sketching an argument that
would be repeated almost verbatim in the opening chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment,
The End of Reason argued that a corrosive skepticism had stripped reason of all
objective content.

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None of the categories of rationalism has survived. Modern science
looks upon such of them as Mind, Will, Final Cause, Transcendental
Creation, Innate Ideas, res extensa and res cogitans as spooks,
despising them even more than Galileo did the cobwebs of
scholasticism.32
Even the notion of reason itself comes to be viewed as a ghost that has emerged from
linguistic usage, a name used to designate a meaningless symbol, an allegorical figure
without a function. It limps on only in the guise of a pragmatic instrument oriented
to expediency .33 In the end, reason is reduced to a strategy of self-preservation that
boils down to an obstinate compliance that is indifferent to any political or religious
content.34
This particular argument looms large in the one part of Dialectic of Enlightenment
written by Horkheimer with little collaboration with Adorno: the books second
excursus, Juliette, or Enlightenment and Morality. This excursus is also, perhaps not
surprisingly, the one part of Dialectic of Enlightenment that deals at any length with the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment. While most of the rest of the book treated
enlightenment as something that spanned human history indeed, in a letter to
Friedrich Pollock Horkheimer suggested that the process of enlightenment was
marked out in the first thought a human being conceived here the focus was squarely
on the historical period we know as the Enlightenment.35 There is perhaps no other part
of Horkheimer and Adornos book that more closely hews to the line that the end product
of the Enlightenment is a brutal nihilism that eviscerates the normative commitments
that had defined the project of Enlightenment in the first place.
The other side of the chiasmus around which the opening chapter of Dialectic of
Enlightenment was woven the idea that myth is already enlightenment had its
origins in a series of discussions between Horkheimer and Adorno that took place in New
York shortly before Horkheimers departure for Los Angeles. Their starting point was a
consideration of the fate of the individual in bourgeois society, and the discussions began
with a review of the treatment of the concept of individuality in Hegel, Marx, and
Freud.36 Reservations about the alleged positivism of psychoanalytic approaches
prompted a closer examination of Freuds account of the Oedipus conflict, which led, in
turn, to a discussion of the Oedipus myth itself, in which Adorno suggested that, The
threshold from myth [Mythos] to maturation [Mndigkeitswerden] is the site of
tragedy.37 Myths, he proposed, could be seen as attempts, in the stage of mankind prior
to individualization, to find words for that for which language has no words.38 They
were, in other words, a first attempt at enlightenment.
While many of the themes that figured in account of the mythic origins of
enlightenment that would be introduced in the opening chapter of Dialectic of
Enlightenment and then taken up in Adornos excursus on the Odyssey had been sketched
by the time Horkheimer left New York for California, one crucial distinction was still
lacking. The New York discussions had focused on the parallels that Horkheimer and
Adorno saw between modern logic and mythical forms of thought. As a result, little
consideration had been given to the question of what it was that mythological forms of
thinking allegedly replaced. It was only in course of the drafting the first chapter of

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Dialectic of Enlightenment that a third category entered the analysis of myth and
enlightenment: magic. This addition can be traced to two sources: Walter Benjamins
account of the mimetic faculty and the work of the French sociologist Marcel Mauss.
Shortly after escaping from Germany, Benjamin had informed his friend Gershom
Scholem that he had written a small and perhaps peculiar text about language.39 The
work in question was a manuscript entitled Doctrine of the Similar, parts of which were
revised and sent to Scholem in October 1933 under the title On the Mimetic Faculty.40
These studies returned to concerns that Benjamin had first explored in his 1916
manuscript On Language as Such and on the Language of Man and, as he explained to
Scholem, they represented a new turn in our old tendency to show the ways in which
magic had been vanquished.41 According to Scholem, the two had engaged in a
discussion in 1918 in which Benjamin attempted to formulate the laws which dominated
the pre-mythical world of spirits, a world which ended with the enormous revolution
that had been inaugurated with the coming of myth.42 Benjamins 1933 manuscripts took
up these speculations one again, this time focusing on the fate of the human faculty for
producing and recognizing similarities, a capacity that Benjamin saw as having withered
to the point where the perceptual world of modern man contains only minimal residues
of the magical correspondences and analogies that were familiar to ancient peoples.43
While it is doubtful that Horkheimer or Adorno had access to these particular texts when
they were at work on Dialectic of Enlightenment (Benjamin tended to be rather
circumspect regarding which texts were sent to which of his friends), echoes of these
ideas turn up in a number of Benjamins works with which they were undoubtedly
familiar: most notably, a 1935 review essay in the Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung on
literature in the area of the sociology of language.44
The evidence for the impact of Marcel Mausss work on Dialectic of
Enlightenment is much clearer. Horkheimer spent the summer after Adornos arrival
devouring a great deal of anthropological literature. At the end of July 1942, he asked
Lowenthal to send him two volumes of Durkheims journal LAnne Sociologique,
singling out the volume that included Marcel Mauss Esquisse d'une thorie gnrale de
la Magie as particularly important for his current work.45 The discussion of magic that
emerged from Mauss work offered evidence for a stance towards nature that
complemented Benjamins conception of the mimetic faculty and could be played off
against the process of categorization and conceptualization that Horkheimer and Adorno
had come to see as common both to mythological and to enlightened thinking.46 Both
mythical and enlightened forms of thought presuppose a split between logos and the
mass of things and creatures in the external world. In myth, the local spirits and
demons that had been the concern of magical thinking are replaced by heaven and its
hierarchy, while the mimetic actions of the magician have given way to the carefully
graded sacrifice and labor of enslaved men. As a result, both the mythical concept of
fate and the enlightened method of abstraction tended toward the same result: they
liquidate individuality by assimilating all particularities under general rules.47 The
recognition that mythology and enlightenment were much more intimately intertwined
than had initially been supposed was eventually reflected in the title chosen for the
chapter at the time of the 1944 publication: the chapter that had initially been labeled
Mythology and Enlightenment now became Dialectic of Enlightenment.

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Some of the difficulties of this maddeningly dense chapter begin to
dissipate once it is recognized that the fulcrum around which it turns has less to do with
the opposition between myth and enlightenment an opposition that had been a
standard trope among conservative cultural critics in the 1920s than with a wildly
speculative philosophical anthropology that sketches an account of the development of
human relationships with nature in which magical/mimetic interactions are replaced by
those efforts at conceptualization and categorization that are fundamental both to
mythological forms of thought and to modern, scientific approaches to nature.48 Drawing
on Benjamins discussion of the weakening of the mimetic faculty, Mauss account of
magical practices, and Caillois discussion of mimetic forms of adaptation in the insect
world, Dialectic of Enlightenment repeatedly invokes what Horkheimer characterized in
one of the notes appended to the book as a hidden history in which mute, bodily
reactions to the overwhelming force of nature were gradually channeled into magical
practices that controlled and ritualized these spontaneous forms mimetic adaptation. 49
Mauss provided one last contribution to Horkheimer and Adornos efforts to trace
the outlines of this hidden history. He argued that belief in the efficacy of magic rested
on what he characterized as the concept of magical potential, an idea of a force of
which the force of the magician, of the ritual and of the spirit are merely different
expressions.50 This notion, allegedly present before all other experience, was the
unconscious category of understanding that made magical ideas possible.51
Ethnographic evidence for such a notion can be found in the idea of mana, a Melanesian
word used to designate a quality, a substance, or an activity and which reveals to us
what has seemed to be a fundamental feature of magic the confusion between actor, rite
and object.52 In the hidden history that Horkheimer and Adorno were constructing mana
stands at the threshold where mimetic adaptation first begins to give way to separation
and categorization. If enlightenment as Horkheimer suggested to Pollock begins with
the first human thought, then the notion of mana may be the closest we can come to the
contents of that thought.
Horkheimer and Adorno understood the term as designating the murky,
undivided entity that had been worshipped at the earliest known stages of humanity. 53
Differentiation first entered this world through fear. Following Vico a thinker for
whom Horkheimer had a long-standing respect Horkheimer and Adorno argued that
the names of individual entities first originated in the cry of terror called forth by the
unfamiliar.54 It is this primal fear that presses humanity ever onwards on the path of
demythologization, of enlightenment. Hence the answer that Horkheimer and Adorno
provided to the question that Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant had addressed at
the close of a happier century: Enlightenment is mythic fear, become radical.55
Had Horkheimer and Adorno been content simply to view myth and
enlightenment as polar opposites, Dialectic of Enlightenment would have offered the sort
of argument that a fair number of its readers assume it is offering. For if the book is
tracing the pathologies that result from the triumph of formal modes of rationality (or,
as it would come to be canonized in the later German translation of Eclipse of Reason,
instrumental reason) over substantive forms, then the remedy for these pathologies
would involve a retreat to a form of reasoning that had yet to be contaminated by the
baleful impact of formal rationality. In such an interpretation, the Enlightenment

11
marks the point where things began to turn incomparably worse: hence the
need to resuscitate some earlier form of reasoning. But, by pushing the category of
enlightenment well beyond the boundaries of the eighteenth century and locating its
origins deep in human prehistory, Horkheimer and Adorno cut off any hope of finding, in
some earlier age, an escape from the demands of enlightenment. Mortimer Adler might
entertain the illusion that a return to the medieval synthesis would cure to woes that
had befallen the modern world, but the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment knew
better. There was no turning back.
III. Nervous Disorders in New York
While Horkheimer and Adorno were untangling the dialectic of myth and
enlightenment in Los Angeles, Dwight Macdonalds relations with his fellow editors at
Partisan Review had reached a breaking point. The January-February issue of the journal
contained a trio of articles by the philosophers Sidney Hook, John Dewey, and Ernest
Nagel that appeared under the collective title The New Failure of Nerve, Part I. One of
the more obvious provocations for the articles was the charge by Adler and others that
naturalism was eroding the spiritual capital bequeathed to democratic societies by
their classical and religious heritage and the notion that the rise of Fascism could be
viewed as a result of the demoralizing effects of positivistic philosophy.56 But, as the
exchanges dragged on over the months that followed, the discussion quickly shifted to the
more politically fraught question of the standpoint that leftist intellectuals should take
towards the conflict in Europe, an issue that would eventually lead to Dwight
Macdonalds departure from the journals editorial board.
The impetus for the articles had come from Hook, who had been present at the
inaugural meeting of Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion and been appalled
by Adlers lecture and who had also become increasingly exasperated by Macdonalds
argument that the war in Europe had, with the German invasion of Stalinist Russia,
turned into a morally meaningless struggle between two totalitarian systems.57 Hook
took the phrase failure of nerve from the classicist Gilbert Murrays account of the rise
of asceticism, mysticism, and pessimism during the Hellenistic period, which
characterized the period prior to the spread of Christianity as marked by a retreat to
mythological forms of thinking, a retreat that Murray attributed, in large part, to the
tendency of the period to follow Platos lead in resolving questions by an appeal to their
inner consciousness rather than through a recourse to objective experiment.58 While
Hook conceded that the new failure of nerve employed a modern idiom, he argued
that both ancient and modern failures of nerve were marked by the same flight from
responsibility, both on the plane of action and on the plane of belief. As illustrations of
this flight, he noted the recent recrudescence of beliefs in the original depravity of
human nature, the ubiquity of prophecies of doom for western civilization dressed
up as laws of social dynamics, the frenzied search for a moral foundation that
transcends human interests, the general pessimism about prospects for social reform,
the refurbishing of theological and metaphysical dogmas, and the ongoing campaign
to prove that without a belief in God and immorality, democracy or even plain moral
decency cannot be reasonably justified.59

12
Hook argued that attempts to attribute the maladies that plagued the
modern world to the triumph of scientific modes of reasoning border on fantasy, since
they presuppose a world in which scientific rationality reigned triumphant. Against this,
he stressed that the scientific method has until now been regarded as irrelevant in testing
the values embodied in social institutions and noted that while liberal, labor, and
socialist movements may have prided themselves on being scientific, they have lost
one social campaign after another and been incapable of providing a positive
philosophy, that would weld emotion and scientific intelligence, as a new rallying
ground. As a consequence, no state has attempted to meet scientifically the challenge
of poverty, unemployment, distribution of raw materials, the impact of technology and,
while the nineteenth century may have witnessed an enthusiasm for the bare results of
the physical sciences, this enthusiasm should not be confused with an acceptance of a
scientific or experimental philosophy of life in which all values are tested by their causes
and consequences.60 While those who, like Adler, sought to link the triumph of fascism
to the relentless progress of science saw themselves as confronting a world whose values
had been laid waste by a triumphant enlightenment, it would seem that Hook looked out
upon a world in which efforts at enlightenment had scarcely begun.
The series continued with four articles in the March-April that, taken as a whole,
indicate a degree of uncertainty as to what was ultimately at stake. The first and in
many ways, the most peculiar was a brief discussion of Kierkegaard (who had been
mentioned, in passing, in Hooks opening essay) by Norbert Guterman, a Polish writer
who studied in Paris in the 1920s, where he moved in Surrealist and Marxist circles
before coming to the United States as an associate of the Institute for Social Research.61
In a jab at Hook, Guterman suggested that those modern existentialist philosophers
who claimed to be Kierkegaards heirs had, in fact, far more in common with the
rationalists they claimed to denounce: they accept and sanction the dualism expressed
in such oppositions as Reason-Faith, Theory-Practice, Knowledge-Instinct, Real-Ideal,
Essence-Existence and differ from the rationalists only in that they chose of the
second term of what remains an abstract opposition. 62 Kierkegaard, in contrast, had the
virtue of remaining unwilling to choose between what remained, in the end, a bad set of
options. In an allusion to Kierkegaards discussion of Job in his Edifying Discourses,
Guterman observed,
Something in Kierkegaard's thinking asserts its universality and
logic not only against shallow refutations but even against the
mythical terms in which it is stated. This is the concept of
"recovery." We doubt whether Job actually recovered what he lost.
But his claims on existence are completely justified. To think
otherwise would be to endorse existence as it is, and to join the
moralists and priests.63
Gutermans article was followed by a contribution from Richard Chase, a literary critic
and close friend of Lionel Trilling, that drawing on recent writings by Aldous Huxley
and Gerald Heard was content to confirm the resurgence of irrationalism that Hook
attacked in his initial article and a brief contribution by the anthropologist Ruth Benedict
that rejected the notion that the social disorders of the world could be traced to the

13
fundamental belligerency of human nature.64 The final article, a continuation
of Hooks opening piece that for reasons of space had been held over until the
present issue, made it clear that the failure of nerve was not confined to traditionminded conservatives such as Adler: the same atmosphere of mysticism, of passionate,
sometimes sacrificial, unrealism, and of hysterical busywork could be found on the
political left.65
From this point onward, the discussion of the new failure of nerve centered on
political matters, with particularly heated exchanges between Hook and Meyer Schapiro
(whose contributions appeared under the pseudonym David Merian) and a response
from Dwight Macdonald that written at the moment when the political breach between
Macdonald and his fellow editors Philip Rahv and William Phillips had become
irreconcilable has been characterized by his biographer as Macdonalds rhetorical
resignation from the journal.66 In Macdonalds view, Hooks attack on the rising tide
of obscurantism had failed to address the crucial question: Why is the tide rising?
Hook, he observed, seemed content to assume that if only people would get some sense
into their heads and act rationally, our problems would be well on the road to solution (or
would never have arisen). But such an assumption failed to see that the Failure of
Nerve needed to be understood as an historical rather than a logical question. What
was required was an analysis capable of understanding how this failure could be seen
as an adaptation to a certain historical situation. 67
For Macdonald, the cause of the failure of nerve lay, most immediately, in what
he described as the increasingly unconscious character of the war in Europe, the
sense that the policies of the United Nations express no positive ideology or principles
but merely an opportunistic adaptation to a reactionary status quo.68 In a bitter passage
he contrasted the entry of Napoleons armies into Italy with the Allies recent victory in
North Africa.
When Bonaparte entered Milan in 1796, the Marquis del Dongo fled
to his country estate; when Eisenhower entered Algiers in 1942, the
men of Vichy entertained his officers at their clubs. Bonaparte
brought along a young artist who gave the delighted Milanese the
first political cartoon they had ever seen: a drawing of a French
soldier slitting the belly of a rich landowner, from which poured not
blood but wheat. Eisenhower brought along Col. Darryl F. Zanuck,
late of Hollywood.69
While the armies of revolutionary France sought to politicize the struggle, the forces
engaged in the battle against Hitlers armies made every effort to play down the
ideological stakes: Some weeks ago, the Office of War Information issued directives to
its propagandists on the nature of the enemy. He was described as a bully, a murderer,
a thief, a gangster, etc., but only once in the lengthy document as a fascist.70 Macdonald
concluded that had been lost was something more than simply the old optimism of
progress the pursuit of the war was increasing marked by a scepticism about basic
values and ultimate ends, a refusal to look too far ahead.71

14
In this abandonment of any concern with basic values and ultimate
ends, Macdonald saw evidence of a broader retreat from a set of principles that had been
painfully built up since the end of the middle ages, commanding general assent since
the eighteenth century, and having finally achieved political reality in the American
and French revolutions.72 In the ensuing conflict between these values and development
of capitalist economies it is the values and not the productive system which are giving
way. Making matter worse, the very forces that were once seen as laying the
foundations for a more humane society had now become its executioners. In a passage
that might well be mistaken for a note dropped from Dialectic of Enlightenment,
Macdonald wrote,
Man has learned to master nature so well that we use the most
advanced technology to blast to bits the fabric of culture. Art
museums, hospitals, vast industrial works, ancient churches and
modernistic housing projects, whole historic cities like Warsaw,
Coventry, Cologne, and Nuremberg all are being destroyed with
the most admirable efficiency week after week, month after month.
Every one can read and write, popular education is a reality and
so the American masses read pulp fiction and listen to soap operas
on that triumph of technology, the radio, and the German and
Russian masses are the more easily indoctrinated with a lying and
debased official culture.73
We now live, Macdonald argued, in pretty much the kind of world Marx and Engels
thought we should be living in, failing socialist revolution: a world of wars, crises, mass
unemployment, centralized power and general instability. But something had gone
astray in the Marxian hope for an alternative. While the incompatibility of private forms
of capitalist enterprise and modern collective forms of mass production was evident, the
expropriators of the bourgeoisie was not the working class, but rather a new political
bureaucracy.74
In the letter Adorno sent to Horkheimer immediately before setting out to join
him in Los Angeles, he described MacDonald and his unnamed colleague as people
who really had something to do with us. The extent of the agreement between exiting
editor of Partisan Review and the exiled director of the Institute for Social Research may
have become somewhat clearer to Horkheimer as he followed the exchanges on the
Failure of Nerve while he and Adorno labored to bring to their account of the selfdestruction of enlightenment to completion. In September 1943 the already
overburdened Horkheimer decided to begin work on a response to Sidney Hook.
IV. Horkheimer Contra Hook
The book that we know as Dialectic of Enlightenment first appeared as a
mimeographed typescript entitled Philosophische Fragmente. Presented to Horkheimers
life-long friend Friedrich Pollock on the occasion of his 50th birthday on May 22, 1944, it
was subsequently circulated (after further editing by Leo Lowenthal) in limited run of
300 copies to friends and associates of the Institute for Social Research at the end of the

15
year. Prior to its publication in 1947 by the migr publisher Querido Verlag it
was subjected to yet another round of revisions which had the effect of stripping a
variety of formulations that, at the start of the Cold War, might raise political suspicions
and appeared carrying the title that had been initially used for the books opening
chapter. While the book published in 1947 differed in style (and, to a degree, in its
ideological allegiances) from the mimeographed copy circulated in 1944, there was little
in the way of an expansion of the scope of the argument. Work on the book had, in
effect, ceased in the spring of 1944, as Horkheimer and Adorno moved on other projects.
It is hardly surprising, then, that much of Horkheimers correspondence during this
period is filled with complaints about the pressure of overlapping commitments and
laments about work not accomplished.
The earliest indication that Horkheimer intended to enter the Failure of Nerve
debate occurred in letters sent to Herbert Marcuse and to Leo Lowenthal on September
11, 1943 (in the letter to Marcuse the text is described as some notes on the articles by
Hook, Dewey, and Nagel, while the letter of Lowenthal describes it as an article that is
almost finished.75 Horkheimer mentioned the article on Hook again in a letter to
Lowenthal written two weeks later, but notes that because he was working with
Adorno night and day on what would become the chapter on the culture industry he
has not had time to finish the last few pages. After that, there is no further discussion
of the article until a letter to Lowenthal dated March 28, 1944, which indicates that
attempts to have the German text translated by Benjamin Nelson have broken down,
apparently due to Nelsons objections to some of Horkheimers arguments: I foresaw
Nelsons reaction to Hook. After all, he is deeply rooted in the tradition in which he was
brought up. By this time, Horkheimer had returned from a visit to New York where,
between February 3 and March 2, he had given a series of lectures on Society and
Reason at Columbia University. These lectures were extensively revised over the next
two years and published by Oxford University Press as The Eclipse of Reason in the
Spring of 1947. In the course of these revisions, portions of Horkheimers article on
Hook at last found a home in the books second chapter: Conflicting Panaceas.76
Horkheimers aim in the chapter was to deepen the contrast between formal and
objective conceptions of rationality with which the book had opened by examining the
form that this division had taken in the current cultural crisis: namely, the attack that
had been launched by positivists such as Hook, Dewey, and Nagel on those faint
hearted intellectuals who, professing to distrust the scientific method, resort to other
methods of knowledge, such as intuition or revelation.77 Among the peculiarities of the
chapter is the difference in the treatment of the two panaceas. While the arguments of
the defenders of positivism chiefly Hook, but also Dewey and Nagel are
explicitly cited, the identity of their neo-Thomist opponents is a good deal more
ambiguous. In an evasive footnote Horkheimer explains that this important
metaphysical school includes some of the most responsible historians and writers of our
day, and then goes on to explain that the critical remarks that follow bear exclusively
on the trend by which independent philosophical thought is being superseded by
dogmatism.78 It is evident that Horkheimer saw the neo-Thomists as fighting a losing
battle: the concepts that they claim to derive from their theological doctrines no longer
form the background of scientific thought.79 As a result, their efforts tend to amount to

16
little more than efforts at reconciling individual thinking to modern forms of
mass manipulation and at streamlining old ideologies by attempting to adapt them to
modern purposes.80 But these unnamed defenders of objective reason are not
Horkheimers chief concern.
The main focus of the chapter falls on Hook and his fellow positivists and
Horkheimers overriding concern is to demonstrate that all of the arguments that can be
marshaled against neo-Thomism apply to positivism as well. The adversaries of neoThomism, he notes, justly point out that dogmatism sooner or later brings talk to a
standstill.81 But the same can be said of the neo-positivists:
Despite its protest against being accused of dogmatism, scientific
absolutism, like the obscurantism it assails, must fall back on selfevident principles. The sole difference is that neo-Thomism is aware
of such presuppositions, while positivism is completely nave about
them.82
If science is to serve as a bulwark against obscurantism a stance that Horkheimer sees
as fundamental to the great tradition of humanism and the Enlightenment it is
incumbent on it to provide a principle that can serve as the criterion for the true nature
of science. But instead, all that is offered is a set of empirical procedures whose claim
to truth rests on nothing more than the dogmatic criteria of scientific success.83 In its
preference for uncomplicated words and sentences that can be grouped at a glance,
positivism falls prey to the anti-intellectual, anti-humanistic tendencies apparent in the
development of modern language, as well as cultural life in general. Its failure to offer
any resistance to these tendencies suggests that it, too, suffers from a failure of nerve.84
But if it was apparent that Horkheimer found the alternatives offered by Adler and
Hook equally unpalatable, it was less clear what he could offer as an alternative. In
retrospect this should hardly be surprising. He had commenced work on the lectures that
would become Eclipse of Reason at the very moment when work on the Dialectic of
Enlightenment had been broken off and found himself forced to provide what his
collaboration with Adorno had been unable to produce. The projected continuation of
Dialectic of Enlightenment was supposed to consist of what Horkheimer characterized as
a positive theory of dialectics and this account would, among other things, explain how
the rescue of enlightenment might be effected.85 Horkheimer letters from this period
betray a deep anxiety about the alternative that Eclipse of Reason provided. In letter to
Lowenthal written in January 1946, he observed
the book, as it is, opposes the concept of nature so directly to that
of spirit, and the idea of object to that of subject, that our philosophy
appears as much too static and dogmatic. We have accused the
others, both Neo-Thomists and Positivists, of stopping thought at
isolated and therefore contradictory concepts and, as it is, it would
be only too easy for them to accuse us of doing the same thing.86
In the absence of such an account, it was hardly surprising that sympathetic readers of
Eclipse of Reason might conclude that it was attempting to offer, in the place of the

17
formal reason that had been criticized in the books opening chapters, a
rehabilitation of the concept of objective reason.
Such an interpretation can be found in the enthusiastic letter that Ruth Nanda
Anshen (a New York editor with whom he had maintained an active correspondence
during his time in California) sent to Horkheimer after the books publication. She
praised him for his defense of the traditional concern of objective reason, that concrete
unity of experience, whereby every abstract entity derives its vitality.87 It was only
her later suggestion, in a review of Erich Fromms Man for Himself (which wound up
inadvertently plagiarizing parts of Eclipse of Reason) that moral life must correspond to
the ontological and metaphysical virtues which include both the lumen naturale and the
lumen supernaturale that finally moved Horkheimer to draft a sharp rejoinder aimed at
distinguishing Ahnsens interpretation of his work from what he understood it to be
saying.
She leans heavily on pseudo-religious prestige values and boldly
proclaims her belief in some of the most commonplace, universally
accepted ideas. My intentions are precisely the opposite. In spite of
my critique of subjective reason and its relapse into a second
mythology a critique bearing only a superficial resemblance to
certain antipathies nourished by Dr. Anshen I have never
advocated a return to an even more mythological objective reason
borrowed from history. I have attacked enlightenment in the
spirit of enlightenment, not of obscurantism.88
But Horkheimer was fighting a losing battle. By replacing the chiasmus of enlightenment
and myth that had been fundamental to the argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment with
MaxWebers stark demarcation between formal and substantive types of reasoning,
Eclipse of Reason invited readings that saw Horkheimer (and, by association, Adorno) as
engaged in a project that sought to find a path that would lead back from the difficulties
that plagued the project of enlightenment to the certainties of a less troubled time.
That misunderstanding remains with us today, with the consequence that, all too
often, Dialectic of Enlightenment tends to be read as one more example of the failure of
nerve that it was attempting to diagnose.

18
Notes
1

Geoffrey Gorer, The Marquis De Sade; a Short Account of His Life and Work (New York:
Liveright, 1934) Gorer and Adornos path crossed briefly when both were involved in Paul Lazarsfelds
radio research project. .
2

Theodor Adorno, letter to Max Horkheimer, November 10, 1941, in Max Horkheimer,
Gesammelte Schriften 17:210-212
3

For a discussion of Macdonald and his relationship of his work to that of Horkheimer and
his colleagues, see Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2009), 149-50, 177-185.
4

For the general aims of the Conference, see Van Wyck Brooks, Conference on Science,
Philosophy and Relgion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, in Science, Philosophy, and
Religion: A Symposium (New York: Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to
the Democratic Way of Life, Inc., 1941), 1-11. and the article 79 Leaders Unite to Aid Democracy, New
York Times, June 1, 1940.
5

Mortimer J. Adler, God and the Professors, in Science, Philosophy, and Religion, ed.
Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life (New
York, 1941), 127-8. In Adlers rather elastic definition, positivism consists of the affirmation of
science, and the denial of philosophy and religion (127).
6

Ibid., 136, 138..

Ibid., 134.

See the account of the event in Adlers self-aggrandizing memoir, Philosopher at Large:
An Intellectual Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1977); for a helplful overview of the broader
context in which the Conference took place, see David A. Hollinger, Science as a Weapon in
Kulturkampfe in the United States during and after World War II, Isis 86, no. 3 (September 1995): 440454.
9

Jacques Maritain, Science, Philosophy, and Faith, in Science, Philosophy, and Religion
(New York: Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of
Life, Inc., 1941), 178-9.
10

Ibid., 182.

11

Carlton J. H. Hayes, The Novelty of Totalitarianism in the History of Western

Civilization, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 82, no. 1 (February 23, 1940): 95-96..
See also, Hayes, The Challenge of Totalitarianism, The Public Opinion Quarterly 2, no. 1 (January
1938): 21-26.
12

John H. Hallowell, The Decline of Liberalism, Ethics 52, no. 3 (April 1942): 345-6.
Hallowell subsequently developed this argument in John H Hallowell, The Decline of Liberalism as an
Ideology, with Particularreference to German Politico-Legal Thought (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner
& co., ltd, 1946). He would further elaborate this line of argument in The Moral Foundation of Democracy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954).

19
13

Hermann Rauschning, The Revolution of Nihilism; Warning to the West, trans. E. W

Dickes (New York: Alliance Book Corporation, 1939), xi-xv, 16-17..
14

Members of the seminar included the economist Eduard Heimann, the political scientist
Erich Hula, the sociologists Karly Mayer and Albert Salomon, and the philosophers Kurt Riezler, Horace
Kallen, and Felix Kaufmann. For a discussion of its activities, see Peter M Rutkoff and William B Scott,
New School: A History of the New School for Social Research (New York: Free Press, 1986), 137-143.
15

For the text of the lecture, see Leo Strauss, German Nihilism, ed. David Janssens and
Daniel Tanguay, Interpretation 26, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 353-378; for discussions, see William H. F.
Altman, Leo Strauss on German Nihilism: Learning the Art of Writing, Journal of the History of Ideas
68, no. 4 (2007): 587-612; Susan Meld Shell, To Spare the Vanquished and Crush the Arrogrant: Leo
Strausss Lecture on German Nihilism, in Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss, ed. Steven B. Smith
(Cambridge [Eng.]: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 171-192; Eugene Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the
Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2006),
95-98.
16

Strauss, German Nihilism, 359-363.

17

Ibid., 359-60.

18

Rauschning, The Revolution of Nihilism; Warning to the West, xii.; Strauss, German
Nihilism, 366-367.
19

For Strauss himself the most relevant contemporary representative of this tradition may
have been his doctoral advisor Ernst Cassirer, the lostness and emptiness of whose views were
definitively demonstrated, in Strausss eyes, in the famous colloquium between Cassirer and Heidegeer at
Davos, Switzerland. For a discussion of the relationship between Strauss and Cassirer, see Sheppard, Leo
Strauss and the Politics of Exile, 16, 21-22, 25, 27-28..
20

Strauss, German Nihilism, 370-372.

21

Peter Viereck, Metapolitics: from the romantics to Hitler (New York: A. A. Knopf,

22

Horkheimer V:25 [Dialectic of Enlightenment 1].

1941).

23

Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991) 11-19. For a reading of Hirschmans typology to
Dialectic of Enlightenment, Bernard Yack, The Fetishism of Modernities (Notre Dame, Ind. : University of
Notre Dame Press, 1997) 126-129
24

See. among many other possible examples, Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism:
Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), 233-4: Adorno and Horkheimer went on to argue that implicit in the
beginnings of the Enlightenment, in Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, was the synthesis of reason, domination,
and myth that was revealed in all its truth in de Sades orgies and Nietzsches aphorisms, and then put into
practice in Auschwitz. Auschwitz was the Enlightenments truth: reason as total domination. What is
striking in rereading this now-classic work is how little, if any, space is allotted to the Enlightenment as a
contributor to the liberal political tradition - political pluralism, parliaments, public discussion, the defense

20
of individual liberty against the state - and how much the book focuses on scientific reason undermining
universal normative claims to the good life.
25

Theodor W Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (London: Verso,

1978), 192.
26

Letter to Robert Maynard Hutchins of January 7, 1939, in Horkheimer, Gesammmelte

Schriften 16:536-7
27

See, for example, his December 1946 lecture to the American Philosophical Association,
Reason Against Itself: Some Remarks on Enlightenment, in What is Enlightenment? EighteenthCentury Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1996).
28

Horkheimer, The End of Reason, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science IX.3 (1941)
pp. 366-388 [reprinted in Arato and Gebhart, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader]; Horkheimer,
Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung in Walter Benjamin zum Gedchtnis (New York & Los Angeles: Institut
fr Sozialforschung, 1942) 17-60 [reprinted in Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften V:320-350]. (All
citations will be to the reprint editions of these essays.)
29

Horkheimer, End of Reason 44; Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung 345

30

Horkheimer, End of Reason 38-39; Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung 338

31

Horkheimer, End of Reason 27; Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung 320-1

32

Horkheimer, End of Reason 27; Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung 322. For a parallel
passage, see Dialectic of Enlightenment 7
33

Horkheimer, End of Reason 27-28; Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung 323

34

Horkheimer, End of Reason 34; Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung 332. Similar accounts
of the reduction of reason to a conformist self-preservation can be found in Horkheimers writings from the
late 1930s. See particularly The Latest Attack on Metaphysics (1937) in Critical Theory 142-3, 165n and
Montaigne and the Function of Skepticism (1938) in Between Philosophy and Social Science 271, 292,
294
35

Letter to Friedrich Pollock, May 7, 1943 in Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften 17:446.

36

The discussions, which began on January 3, 1939 and concluded on April 5, 1939, were
transcribed by Gretel Adorno and have been published as Diskussion ber die Differenz zwischen
Positivismus und materialistischer Dialektik, in Horkheimer, Gesammmelte Schriften XII:436-492.
37

Ibid. 453

38

Ibid. 454-5

39

Walter Benjamin, Letter to Geshom Scholem of March 20, 1933 [Benjamin-Scholem

Correspondence 35].

21
40

For a discussion of the two texts, see Wolin, 239-249. For a brief discussion of the
influence of Benjamin on the notion of mimesis in Dialectic of Enlightenment, see Buck-Morss 87-88
41

Letter to Scholem of June 29, 1933, [Benjamin-Scholem Correspondence 61].

42

Scholem, History of a Friendship [German edition, 79-80].

43

Benjamin, On the Mimetic Faculty, Selected Writings II:721

44

See Walter Benjamin, Problems of the Sociology of Language, in Selected Writings,

Volume 3, 68-93. It is also conceivable that these issues may have been among the topics that Adorno and
Benjamin discussed during in meetings that immediately preceded Adornos departure from Europe for
America.
45

Letter to Leo Lowenthal of July 22, 1942, Leo Lowenthal Papers, Folder 12. Mauss
Esquisse d'une thorie gnrale de la Magiewas first published in LAnne Sociologique 7 (1902-3) 1-146
[translated by Robert Brain as A General Theory of Magic (New York: Norton, 1972)]. The work is cited
in DE 256, ft. 20. The other volume he requested contained Durkheim and Mauss De quelques formes
primitive de classification, LAnne Sociologique 6 (1901-1902) 1-72, which is cited in DE 256, ft. 25.
46

Further support for the idea that the first traces of enlightenment can be found in
mythology could have been drawn from the other volume of the Anne Sociologiques that Horkheimer
requested from Lowenthal. In their essay Primitive Classification, Durkheim and Mauss argued that the
classification system employed in musthologies have played an important part in the evolution of religious
thought; they have facilitated the reduction of a multiplicity of gods to one, and consequently they have
prepared the way for monotheism. Citing the development of Greek mythology, they argued, Minor and
specialized gods are gradually subsumed under more general headings, the great nature gods, and tend to be
absorbed by them. Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification 78-9.
47

DE 9

48

For a brief discussion of the many uses to which the notion of mythos was being put
during the 1920s, see Theodore Ziolkowski, Der Hunger Nach Mythos, in Reinhold Grimm and Jost
Hermand, eds. Die Sogenannten Zwanziger Jahre (Bad Hamburg, Berlin, Zrich: Verlag Gehlen, 1970)
169-201
49

DE 204

50

Magic 107

51

Magic 118

52

Magic 108

53

DE 10

54

DE 10

55

DE 11 (translation modified).

22
56

Sidney Hook, The New Failure of Nerve, Partisan Review X, no. 1 (1943): 20., John
Dewey, Anti-Naturalism in Extremis, Partisan Review X, no. I (1943): 31., and Ernest Nagel, Malicious
Philosophies of Science, Partisan Review X, no. I (n.d.): 42-3, 51, 54-5.. Responses to the articles
occupied in the next four issues of the journal. For Hooks initial response to Adler, see Sidney Hook, The
New Medievalism, New Republic 103 (Oct. 28, 1940): 602-6. An additional provocation for the Failure
of Nerve articles were a flurry of articles by Lewis Mumford, Waldo Frank, and Archibald MacLeish
arguing that the triumph of pragmatic and naturalistic approaches threatened to undermine American
resistance to fascism. See Lewis Mumford, The Corruption of Liberalism, New Republic 1 02 (Apr. 29,
1940): 568-73; Waldo Frank, Our Guilt in Fascism, New Republic 102 (May 6, 1940): 603-8; and
Archibald MacLeish, The lrresponsibles, Nation 150 (May 18, 1940): 618-23. For a discussion of Hooks
relationship to Partisan Review and the broader political context of these articles, see Christopher Phelps,
Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1997), 166-171, 221225. There is also brief discussion of the episode John P Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism
and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 386-396.
Hooks papers at the Hoover Institute contain an undated handwritten document that sketches out an
announcement of the series
57

For a summary of Macdonalds views on the war in the period prior to the attack on Pearl
Harbor, which were shared by his colleague Clement Greenberg, see Michael Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense
of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 86-103.
58

Murray, Four Stages of Greek Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1912),
103, 109-110, 120, 133, 141.
59

Hook, The New Failure of Nerve, 2-3.

60

Ibid., 8-10..

61

For a brief discussion of the essay, and of Gutermans relationship to the Institute for
Social Research, see Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2009), 128-9.
62

Norbert Guterman, Neither-Nor, Partisan Review X, no. 2 (April 1943): 139.

63

Ibid., 140.

64

Richard V. Chase, The Huxley-Heard Paradise, Partisan Review X, no. 2 (1943): 143158; Ruth Benedict, Human Nature is Not a Trap, Partisan Review X, no. 2 (1943): 159-164.
65

Sidney Hook, The Failure of the Left, Partisan Review X, no. 2 (April 1943): 165. For
the exchanges between Schapiro and Hook see See David Merian, The Nerve of Sidney Hook, Partisan
Review X, no. 5 (June 1943): 248-257.; Hook, The Politics of Wonderland, Partisan Review X, no. 5
(June 1943): 258-262.; and Merian and Hook, Socialism and the Failure of Nerve, Partisan Review X,
no. 5 (September 1943): 473-.
66

Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition, 121.

67

Dwight Macdonald, The Future of Democratic Values, Partisan Review X, no. 4

(August 1943): 321.
68

Ibid., 325.

23
69

Ibid., 323.

70

Ibid., 324.

71

Ibid., 325.

72

Ibid., 326.

73

Ibid., 327-8.

74

Ibid., 329-31.

75

For the letter to Marcuse, see Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften 17:470-1; the letter to
Lowenthal (along with the others cited in this paragraph) is in the Leo Lowenthal Papers at Harvard
University.
76

For a discussion of the Columbia lectures and their relationship to Eclipse of Reason, see
my The Eclipse of Reason and the End of the Frankfurt School in America, New German Critique, no.
100 (January 1, 2007): 47-76.
77

Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), 58.

78

Ibid., 62.

79

Ibid., 64.

80

Ibid., 65-6.

81

Ibid., 70.

82

Ibid., 72.

83

Ibid., 77.

84

Ibid., 85.

85

This is made clearest in Horkheimers response to Leo Lowenthals enthusiastic praise of

the Philosophische Fragmente: it is a fine thing that you like the book and I hope that the second part
will still be much better. Letter to Lowenthal, June 14, 1944, Leo Lowenthal Papers, bMS Ger 185 (47),
folder 17. Some preliminary notes for this work were published as Rettung der Aufklrung. Diskussen
ber eine geplante Schrift zur Dialektik, in Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften 12:593-606. In his
editorial note, Gunzelin Schmidt Noerr characterizes these notes as evidence of Horkheimer and Adornos
intention after the conclusion of Dialectic of Enlightenment to write a further general work on the
dialectic (593). Yet Horkheimers letters from the period when he was working on the Philosophische
Fragmente, suggest that at least initially the discussion of the rescue of enlightenment was seen as
something that needed to be included in the Fragmente to bring them to completion, rather than as another
book. It was only in the wake of the decision to publish Philosophische Fragmente as Dialectic of
Enlightenment that Horkheimer began to speak unambiguously of a second book devoted to the topic.

24
86

Letter to Lowenthal of January 10, 1946, Leo Lowenthal Papers.

87

Letter to Horkheimer from Ruth Nanda Anshen of July 23, 1947, Horkheimer,
Gesammelte Schriften 17:867-8. The letter continues, somewhat embarrassingly, When will you
communicate your knowledge, your insight, your genius, to us more concretely, Max? When will you
corporealise your spirit which everlastingly abides with us?
88

Horkheimer, draft of a letter to the editor of Philosophical Review, April 1949,

Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften 18:23. Since the letter was never printed in the Philosophical Review,
it is possible that Horkheimer never sent it.