Who's Afraid of the Enlightenment?

For the German social critics, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries advanced freedom at the cost of freedom. While the triumph of reason and rationality emancipated the individual from superstition, religion, and prejudice, it laid the ground for another kind of domination. In their essay, "The Dialectic of Enlightenment," Adorno and Horkheimer argued that, in subordinating the natural world to man's will, modern science and technology tended to convert reason into an instrument of domination, of which the Nazi death camps were a glaring testimonial. The empowerment of reason, in effect, was irrational. Reason for reason's sake, the condition for true freedom, was incompatible with modernity's hyper-capitalist, advanced industrial order.

Many post-war intellectuals in the arts and humanities were skeptical, not so much about science, but of scientism. They saw traditional forms of human community eroding, individuality and self-determination suppressed by technology. Urban centers in industrialized nations were particularly vulnerable. Accordingly, critiques of modern science often invoked the conformism and standardization which scientific progress supposedly entailed. The human being, for these thinkers, was becoming machine-like. His victory over nature was also a victory over his natural self; in its place, man developed a formalized morality, susceptible to external control and manipulation. As Adorno and Horkheimer theorized, this was indeed the negative legacy of the European Enlightenment.