We citizens of the West in this late modern - or postmodern, or perhaps even post-postmodern - era like to think that what is good about our world is something that we owe in no small measure to the Enlightenment. But Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno would argue that such nostalgia for the Enlightenment and such approval for its accomplishments is a dangerous path to go down. Writing in 1947, the two men - in their essay "The Concept of Enlightenment" argued that anything can be turned to evil ends. Human rationality and human intelligence were the celebrated discoveries of the Enlightenment: Our ability to think critically and to reason were supposed to be the tools of our salvation.
The concept of the Enlightenment was celebrated even as it was occurring in the 18th century: It is not so much a term applied to the era and its intellectual accomplishments by later students of this time but an idea celebrated by the theorists of the 18th century themselves. They believed that they (and indeed all of human society) were emerging from a period of superstition and moral blindness, a time in which people believed that everything was in the hands of God - or perhaps fate and that humans had little if any agency in their own lives. But these dark times were all coming to an end: Science and reason would save us because the human intellect was far more powerful than had yet been imagined.
Horkheimer and Ardorno did not argue with this last part of the assessment of Enlightenment thinkers. They too believed that the human mind was a powerful tool. But they also believed - standing in the immediate penumbra of the Holocaust, seeing still the lingering bloody effects of fascist regimes across the world - that the thinkers of the Enlightenment had been unimaginably nanve. The might of human intellect, they argued was displayed at its fullest not in the framing of the Constitution but in the totalitarian oppressiveness and slaughter of the...