American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Dialectic, Adorno and Horkheimer drew heavily on Nietzsche’s critique of the Enlightenment to challenge the conventional view of its legacies as progress. The Enlightenment’s unwarranted esteem for human rationality, they argued, did not simply lead to the “disenchantment of the world” —it sowed the seeds of its own destruction. By exalting the limitless power of instrumental rationality, the Enlightenment cultivated an ideology in which nothing lay beyond the power of human apprehension, domination, and administration. The “administered world” of Nazism, then, represented the realization, not the abandonment, of the Enlightenment: the “Enlightenment is totalitarian.”