The essay opens by arguing that The Odyssey demonstrates the dialectic of enlightenment. While Homer draws on popular mythic traditions, he arranges them into a coherent and ordered narrative whose rational structure contradicts those very traditions. The portrayal of Odysseus, the authors claim, is a prototype of the bourgeois individual, whose survival is secured through unrelenting self-assertion.

The authors credit the early work of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche with recognizing Enlightenment’s dual character as a force that exposes the myths used by rulers and priests, and a tool rulers use to keep populations governable. They note that Nietzsche’s pre-fascist followers took only the nihilistic dimension of his ideas and perverted them into ideology. Fascist cultural critics who condemned Homer’s rational style nevertheless correctly identified bourgeois qualities in archaic texts, thereby paradoxically acknowledging enlightenment’s ancient roots. Horkheimer and Adorno criticize the German essayist and historian Rudolf Borchardt’s anti-modernist interpretation of The Odyssey. They argue Borchardt was influenced by an unwillingness to threaten the proto-fascist values he supported, and failed to recognize that the primal forces he exalted in the