Dialectic of Enlightenment develops a radical critique of instrumental reason, the form of means-ends calculability that defines modern life. This mode of thought reflects what sociologist Max Weber identified as the defining feature of modernity. As Weber notes, “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world’” (Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation.” From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (trans. Gerth & Mills). Oxford University Press, 1946). For Horkheimer and Adorno, this process narrows reason to a tool for domination by privileging mathematical formalism, efficiency, and technique as the sole standards of validity.

The authors fuse Weber’s analysis of “disenchantment” with a Marxian critique of commodity exchange. Marx argued that commodity exchange appears to be a free and equal transaction between individuals while concealing the unequal social relations that make it possible. Commodity exchange also produces what Marx calls “commodity fetishism,” reducing relationships between people to relationships between things and prices. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that as enlightenment equates thought with mathematics and reduces nature to a quantifiable object, it paradoxically reverts to the repetitive logic of myth. 

The book opens by emphasizing the gap between enlightenment’s aims and its outcomes. While its goal was human liberation, “the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity” (1). The authors argue that this catastrophe is the result of reducing reason to an instrument that cancels out both the thinking subject and the meaning of its objects. Following Francis Bacon’s program for knowledge as power, technology became the essence of knowledge aimed at exploitation. Concepts were replaced by formulas, liquidating difference through abstraction and enforcing social conformity. Thus, the book traces how emancipatory reason transforms into a logic of domination that ensnares humanity in a new barbarism.