It’s hardly surprising that scholars working in the area of eighteenth-century studies tend not to be well-disposed towards Dialectik der Aufklärung. At best, anyone who enters Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s labyrinth hoping to learn something about “the Enlightenment” is bound to come away somewhat confused. Explicit discussions of eigh­teenth century figures are scarce (they are confined, for the most part, to the book’s discussion on Kant and Sade) and tend to be lost in a cast of characters that stretches from Oedipus and Odysseus through Francis Bacon, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud, and onward to Greta Garbo, Donald Duck, and Adolf Hitler. Since I’m teaching the book again this term as part of a course on “Enlightenment and its Critics,” I thought it might make sense to consider some of the reasons why this peculiar book has managed to cause so much confusion, especially since those confusions have something to do with the conceptual history of the notion of “enlightenment” itself.

It hasn’t help matters that the Anglophone discussions of the book were, at least initially, not entirely clear as to how to deal with the title. Attempts to render it as Dialectic of the Enlightenment were not uncommon (see, for example, Dick Howard, “A Politics in Search of the Political,” Theory and Society 1:3 (1974) 279). But confusions about what the book is doing are hardly confined to Anglophone readers. Concluding that something must have gone terribly wrong with the book’s treatment of the concept of “enlightenment,” Norbert Hinske bemoaned the “blindness of the authors towards all problems of conceptual history” and chastised Horkheimer and Adorno for their projection of “enlightenment” – a concept that “is originally bound to a specific epoch” – back onto earlier periods (see his “Einleitung,” in Was ist Aufklärung? Beiträge aus der Berlinischen Monatsschrift (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981) xiv and his further thoughts in the afterward for the second edition, 553-558).

It turns out that complaints of this sort have accompanied the book from the start. In one of the few initial reviews of the work, the Stuttgart philosopher Max Bense (“Hegel und die kalifornische Emigration,” Merkur IV:1 (1950) 118-125) observed that the book had ignored the contributions of Diderot and Condorcet and went on to criticize its authors for their use of a “one-sided” conception of enlightenment that had been chiefly derived from Francis Bacon, whose presence loomed large in the book’s opening pages. But Bense differed from later critics in one important respect. As he saw it, the problem with Dialectic of Enlightenment was not that its concept of enlightenment was too expansive; he thought that it was not expansive enough. Because they constructed their concept around the notions of “fear,” “domination,” and “totalitarianism,” Horkheimer and Adorno were guilty in his eyes of employing an essentially “feudalistic” notion of enlightenment. As a result, they could not appreciate the extent to which enlightenment was a concept that transcended historical periods: it is a notion that “is defined in other terms in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries than it is in the sixteenth and seventeenth century.”

Bense’s review suggests that Hinske’s understanding of the conceptual history of the concept of enlightenment is not without its blind spots. For though Bense may have had reservations about the particular way in which Horkheimer and Adorno framed their concept of enlightenment, he found nothing objectionable about their use of the term to designate a process that reached back into Greek antiquity. Indeed, the discussion of the “transition from mythology to enlightenment” in Dialektik der Aufklärung reminded him of two other recent studies: Wilhelm Nestle’s Vom Mythos zum Logos (1940) and Bruno Snell’s Die Entdeckung des Geistes (1946). What Horkheimer and Adorno were doing struck him as an attempt to bring a “sociological” analysis to bear on a question that Nestle had approached from the perspective of a “philosophy of history” and Snell had analyzed from the standpoint of the “history of language.”

Of the two other studies Bense cited, Vom Mythos zum Logos was the more ambitious in seeking to draw analogies between the eighteenth century and classical antiquity. Indeed, in sketching the broad outlines of the trajectory that his book intended to trace, Nestle turned to Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?” and drew a parallel between path from mythos to logos that his book proposed to trace and the passage from “immaturity to maturity” that, for Kant, had been the hallmark of enlightenment (Nestle 6) Analogies of this sort had long figured in Nestle’s work. He had opened his 1901 study Euripides, Poet of the Greek Enlightenment with the observation that, while there were a number of “excellent presentations of Greek philosophy,” a “history of the Greek enlightenment” was lacking (6). For the rest of his career, he worked at providing one. A 1909 article argued that, just as “the ideas of enlightenment” associated with Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot paved the way for the French Revolution, so too the “age of Greek enlightenment” in the second half of the fifth century provided support for a revolution, albeit a revolution that proceeded not “from below” but rather “from above, in a reaction in aristocratic intellectual circles against the degenerate democracy” (“Politik und Aufklärung in Griechland im Ausgang des V. Jahrhunderts v. Chr.,” Neue Jahrbücher für das klassische Alterum, Geschichte, und Deutsches Literatur 1:1 (1909) 1-22). In an article published the next year, Nestle characterized Sophocles as standing in “fundamental and violent opposition against everything that is called enlightenment” (“Sophokles und die Sophistik,” Classical Philology V:2 (1910) 135-6).